The Sibyl

No 1 : Spring 2007

Vineta Colby: Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press 2003.
Reviewed by Marion Thain.

As Colby notes, Vernon Lee asked that her biography never be written and proclaimed that on her death she would leave her life to no-one. Lee was certainly a very private individual who, through her ‘cold’ and ‘hard’ exterior, protected herself from the damage that affection can bring. Colby’s biography seems to respect this at the same time as exposing it; the book doesn’t feel like a betrayal of Lee’s privacy and it avoids the kind of familiarity which would simplify the complexities of Lee’s character.

Writing the biography of a Victorian intellectual is a difficult task because these figures tend to encompass such diverse and wide-ranging debates within their lives and their work. Also, there is often an overwhelming quantity of manuscript material and correspondence to be located and studied. This is all particularly so for the student of Vernon Lee. In fact, Vernon Lee offers further challenges of temporal diversity because she lived until 1935, dying in a world so different to that in which she was born. Is it any wonder that, later in life, she celebrated the protean? In her biography Colby does an excellent job of marshalling the writer’s diverse interests and presenting her aesthetics, her politics, her interest in psychoanalysis, music and art, as well as signalling the changes of opinion which inevitably occur over a lifetime which saw two world wars come and go. The overview Colby achieves is both admirable in scholarly terms, but also enormously readable: a remarkable insight into the life of a fascinating figure.

In this book we find the better known quotations and stories tied into a carefully organised whole with much less familiar, and always illuminating, citations. The book is no doubt presented by the publishers with as much of an eye to the general reader as to the academic, and its style certainly makes it an accessible and entertaining piece. The introduction of Pater’s thought, for example, and Lee’s reception of it, is handled in such a way as to introduce the issues to the uninitiated, while maintaining the complexity of the problems. Recent criticism of Lee’s fictional works is usefully drawn on in several chapters, in a manner appropriate for both the general and academic reader.

It is surely the vice of only the best 300-plus page books that they leave you wanting more on every page? Not only did I want to hear more about current scholarship on the fiction, I also wanted to hear more about the Robinson salon into which Lee was drawn (and her experiences there), more about the mysterious Eugene, more about Kit, and more about that colourful assortment of characters Lee associated with in Italy. But this can hardly be a criticism: there are no words wasted in this elegantly written book. In the end, my only quibble is over Colby’s statement that Lee made no major contribution to psychology or aesthetics (167). The same admirable distance from her subject which makes this biography so astute, also causes Colby to err on the side of caution in the claims she makes for Lee. Yet what makes this biography so timely is the recent resurgence of interest in Lee which is making a claim for the significance of Lee’s work to philosophers of aesthetics as well as to literary critics and historians.

While Colby’s biography must be situated at the centre of a revival of interest in Vernon Lee, this is a book which can stand on its own terms as an erudite, eloquent and engaging study of the highest quality.