Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales

352 Pages·2006·1.66 MB·English

by  Vernon Lee

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This electronic material is under
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HAUNTINGS AND
OTHER FANTASTIC TALES
A First Modern English Edition of
Les Évangiles des Quenouilles
broadview editions
series editor: L.W. Conolly
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HAUNTINGS AND
OTHER FANTASTIC TALES
Vernon Lee
Les Évangiles des Quenouilles
translated by Thomas K.Abbott
with revisions by Lara Denis
edited by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham
broadview editions
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©2006 Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham
All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,transmit-
ted in any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,record-
ing,or otherwise,or stored in a retrieval system,without prior written consent of
the publisher—or in the case of photocopying,a licence from Access Copyright
(Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency),One Yonge Street,Suite 1900,Toronto,
Ontario M5E 1E5—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lee,Vernon,1856–1935.
Hauntings and other fantastic tales / Vernon Lee ;edited by Catherine
Maxwell and Patricia Pulham.
(Broadview editions)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-55111-578-6
1. Fantasy fiction,English. I. Maxwell,Catherine,1962- II. Pulham,
Patricia,1959- III. Title. IV. Series.
PR5115.P2H69 2006 823′.8 C2006-900632-6
Broadview Editions
The Broadview Editions series represents the ever-changing canon of litera-
ture in English by bringing together texts long regarded as classics with valu-
able lesser-known works.
Advisory editor for this volume:Eugene Benson
Broadview Press is an independent,international publishing house,incorpo-
rated in 1985.Broadview believes in shared ownership,both with its employ-
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Contents
Acknowledgements (cid:127) 7
Introduction (cid:127) 9
Vernon Lee:ABrief Chronology (cid:127) 29
A Note on the Texts (cid:127) 33
Preface to Hauntings(1890) (cid:127) 37
“Amour Dure”(1887,1890) (cid:127) 41
“Dionea”(1890) (cid:127) 77
“Oke of Okehurst”(1886,1890) (cid:127) 105
“A Wicked Voice”(1887,1890) (cid:127) 154
“Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady”(1896) (cid:127) 182
“A Wedding Chest”(1904) (cid:127) 229
Preface to “The Virgin of the Seven Daggers”(1927) (cid:127) 243
“The Virgin of the Seven Daggers”(1896,1909,1927) (cid:127) 249
Appendix A:From Algernon Charles Swinburne,“Notes on
Designs of the Old Masters at Florence”(1868,1875) (cid:127) 279
Appendix B:From Walter Pater,“Pico della Mirandula”(1871,
1873) (cid:127) 283
Appendix C:From Walter Pater,“Lionardo da Vinci”(1869,
1873) (cid:127) 287
Appendix D:Vernon Lee,“Faustus and Helena:Notes on the
Supernatural in Art”(1880,1881) (cid:127) 291
Appendix E:A.Mary F.Robinson,“Before a Bust of Venus”
(1881) (cid:127) 321
Appendix F:Eugene Lee-Hamilton,“The Mandolin”
(1882) (cid:127) 325
Appendix G:A.Mary F.Robinson,“The Ladies of Milan”
(1889) (cid:127) 333
Appendix H:Eugene Lee-Hamilton,“On a Surf-Rolled Torso of
Venus”(1884,1894) (cid:127) 337
Appendix I:Vernon Lee,“Out of Venice at Last”(1925) (cid:127) 339
Bibliography (cid:127) 343
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Acknowledgements
In preparing this edition we have benefited from the kind assis-
tance of a number of people.We would like to thank Stefano
Evangelista, Franca Basta, and Mike Edwards for help with the
translation of German, Italian, and Latin phrases, and Terry
Pulham for his work in checking many of the typescripts.Stefano
Evangelista also helpfully identified the quotation from Goethe’s
Roman Elegies in “Amour Dure,”while Margaret Stetz provided
the date of death for Lee’s dedicatee Margaret Brooke.We would
also like to acknowledge Patricia Burdick,the Librarian of Colby
College, which holds Lee’s copyright, for permission to publish
this selection of her short stories and other prose.
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Introduction
Vernon Lee,described by Maurice Baring as “by far the clever-
est person I have ever met in my life,”1 first appeared on the
British literary scene at the age of 24 with a critical work,Studies
of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880),promptly acclaimed for
its elegant style and breadth of erudition.With this passport to
literary and artistic circles that included such prominent figures
as Robert Browning, William Michael Rossetti, Walter Pater,
Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, Lee quickly established herself
as a force to be reckoned with, following up her early triumph
with a succession of essay and story collections,many of which
reflected her cosmopolitan continental outlook and, in particu-
lar,her love and deep knowledge of Italy,her adopted homeland.
In a writing career that spanned 53 years she won international
renown, producing 43 major works that reflected her wide-
ranging interests in fiction, aesthetics, philosophy, history, and
travel writing. More recently, Lee has emerged as one of the
leading writers whose work bridged the gap between late-Victo-
rian aestheticism and early modernist writing,earning the inter-
est of scholars who recognise that literary modernism owes more
to its predecessors than its practitioners cared to admit. To
modern readers she offers the satisfying spectacle of the eco-
nomically independent woman of letters,apparently more or less
free to say, write, and do as she pleased. This freedom may,
however,have been partly responsible for her loss of popularity
in the early twentieth century when she seems to have lost her
audience as she turned increasingly to more philosophical con-
cerns.Moreover,she saw a further decline in her readership due
to the unpopularity of the pacifist stance she adopted during
World War I. However, there were other factors involved: her
work was unstrategically disseminated, often published in
1 “Vernon Lee”was the pseudonym of Violet Paget (1856-1935),who
adopted the name in 1875 when publishing her first articles because,as
she later remarked in 1878,“no one reads a women’s writing on art,
history or aesthetics with anything but mitigated contempt”(Vernon
Lee’s Letters,59).She was known to her friends as “Vernon.”Maurice
Baring (1874-1945),British diplomat,linguist,and author was a friend
of Vernon Lee and the dedicatee of her short story collection For
Maurice(1927).See his Lost Lectures of the Fruit of Experience(London:
Peter Davies,1932) 68.
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several periodicals before being offered to book publishers,and
the essay style in which she specialised began to seem outmoded
in the changing literary climate of the early twentieth century.
More generally,Lee’s strong personality and strongly held opin-
ions seem to have aroused the hostility of a number of male
writers and thinkers: the historian John Addington Symonds
(1840-93) resented her failure to accept his corrections, the
philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) appeared jealous of
her sway over younger women, the cartoonist Max Beerbohm
(1872-1956) nastily caricatured her as a busybody who picked
fights with male luminaries, and the art historian and critic
Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) accused her of plagiarising his
ideas. In addition, the up-and-coming generation of writers,
unable or unwilling to acknowledge their indebtedness,claimed
to find her work stylistically fusty and irrelevant.Thus the advent
of modernism, and the establishment of a predominantly male
literary canon, assisted her literary demise, and it is only now
that Lee’s contribution to English literature and to the develop-
ment of modernist writing is being fully acknowledged.
A revival of interest in Vernon Lee over the last 20 years or so
has resulted in an increasing flow of essays, articles, and, more
recently,monographs,which have,with the addition of an inter-
national conference devoted to discussion of her life and works,
begun to give this considerable if long-neglected woman writer
the attention she deserves.1 Clearly,for her work to reach a new
generation of readers,new editions are needed.Lee’s stories have
always been among the most popular and accessible of her works
and have regularly been reprinted in anthologies. However,
modern collections of her stories, although obtainable, are
unedited, providing little or no context for the work, and, more
importantly, providing no guidance in the way of annotation to
the dense allusiveness of Lee’s writing—those many references to
European art and literature,to myth,history,and geography that
so enrich an understanding of her fiction.This collection aims to
provide that context and help readers gain a better appreciation
of the way in which Lee’s wide range of reference contributes to
her meaning. Learning, for example, something of the troubled
lives of the famous Renaissance women mentioned in “Amour
Dure,” such as Lucrezia Borgia and Bianca Cappello, helps the
reader respond to Lee’s Medea da Carpi not merely as an enig-
1 “Vernon Lee:Literary Revenant,”held at the Institute of English
Studies,Senate House,London University,10 June 2003.
10 INTRODUCTION