Vernon Lee 1856-1935

Vernon Lee (b. Violet Paget, 1856–1935) was a prolific and diverse author, producing over 40 major works and numerous shorter pieces spanning historical studies of art and music, short stories and supernatural tales, novels, dramas, works on aesthetic theory, literary criticism, travel writing, meditations on houses and gardens, and pacifist polemic. Born to British parents, her early life was spent in Europe before eventually settling in Italy. A cosmopolitan from birth, speaking and writing in several European languages, she was an important part of late-nineteenth-century British aestheticism. From 1881 she spent time each year in Britain, her reputation early established by the well-received Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy(1880), published when she was just 24. Renowned as a brilliant talker and sought out for her intellectual power, associated with sexual dissidence and the avant-garde, she nevertheless unsettled elite artistic circles when she satirized..