Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Victorian Literature and Culture)

Rating:
Summary: A woman who spoke her mind 100 years ago and more
Review: Vineta Colby's scholarship is relaxed and assured. Page after page of this book presents information that will be new even to those who thought they knew all about the mysterious "Vernon Lee," the pen name-slash-alter ego of the British heiress Violet Paget, who preferred Italy to her own nation and writing to either. The women who Lee loved are also an interesting gallery, and her brother, the aesthete Eugene, who travelled flat on his back with a male attendant to take care of him, is a whole different trip, deserving of a book of his own.

All in all, a terrific biography. I deduct one star only because, skilled as she is as a writer, she cannot manage to make Vernon Lee's individual writings even a fraction as interesting as she says they are. This is a problem Michael Holroyd faced with his magisterial biography of Lytton Strachey, like Vernon Lee a decidedly minor talent, but Holroyd managed to surmount the inherent problems and delivered a convincing defense of Strachey's writing in various categories, but this Colby cannot do. The reasons for this are both manifold and obvious, but a splendid try.

Rating:
Summary: A woman who spoke her mind 100 years ago and more
Review: Vineta Colby's scholarship is relaxed and assured. Page after page of this book presents information that will be new even to those who thought they knew all about the mysterious "Vernon Lee," the pen name-slash-alter ego of the British heiress Violet Paget, who preferred Italy to her own nation and writing to either. The women who Lee loved are also an interesting gallery, and her brother, the aesthete Eugene, who travelled falt on his back with a male attendant to take care of him, is a whole different trip, deserving of a book of his own.

All in all, a terrific biography. I deduct one star only because, skilled as she is as a writer, she cannot manage to make Vernon Lee's individual writings even a fraction as interesting as she says they are. This is a problem Michael Holryod faced with his magisterial biography of Lytton Strachey, like Vernon Lee a decidedly minor talent, but Holroyd managed to surmount the inherent problems and delivered a convincing defense of Strachey's writing in various categories, but this Colby cannot do. The reasons for this are both manifold and obvious, but a splendid try.