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THE ‘TIGER CAT’S’ LETTERSSelected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935, volume i. Edited by Amanda Gagel and Sophie Geoffroy

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/escrit/cgx017

1471-6852

BERNARD RICHARDS,

American and British Literature Analysis

For many, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935) will be not much more than a footnote in T. S. Eliot studies, since in The Waste Land manuscript she appears in naff couplets in the Fresca section: Pound rightly recommended him to drop it in the published version. For others she is a worthy figure in the history of lesbianism. And for others a footnote in Henry James studies, where she appears as a dangerous ‘tiger cat’. She is not a major literary figure, but she is important, as an essayist, aesthetician, novelist, and short-story writer. The Internet articles on the castle at Belcaro near Siena do not mention the fact that she wrote a collection of essays named after it; if she were slightly more famous they would. Certainly she is worth the treatment of a good edition of her letters. This excellent one replaces the 1937 edition by Irene Cooper Willis, which was not heavily annotated, and did not contain the interesting letters to her intimate friend Mary Robinson included in this new edition, and hitherto relatively inaccessible in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It supplements the image of Vernon Lee to be built up from the published work. She was highly intelligent and cultivated, and was versed in musical and art history, religious controversy, politics and literature. The broad range of interests is fully on view in the letters, and, indeed, her early letters in French to her half-brother poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845-1907) are well-researched scholarly efforts. Vernon Lee was independent-minded – perhaps because she did not have a conventional school education. The word that most readily comes to mind as one encounters her is feisty (not a word available then; one has to reach for some other word, such as Mary Costelloe’s ‘strenuous’). Many of her contemporaries were critical of her style, and it is perhaps an acquired taste, with its multiple parentheses and qualifications and cavalier way with syntax. An informative feature of the letters for literary historians is that they provide a detailed picture of the arduous journey for an aspiring author breaking into the publishing world.