Hostname: page-component-669899f699-vbsjw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-28T18:45:06.122Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Vernon Lee: Slow Serialist and Journalist at the Fin de Siècle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2021

Linda K. Hughes Open the ORCID record for Linda K. Hughes [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

To expand understanding of imbricated journalism and high aestheticism at the fin de siècle, this essay examines Vernon Lee's journalism and slow essay serials, a form spread over space (viz., different periodicals) and marked by irregular temporal issue of installments before finding new cohesion when retroactively constructed as a book. Lee's prolific periodical publication, especially her aesthetic criticism, is rarely approached as journalism. Newly available letters and Lee's negotiations with editors clarify the occluded history of Lee's journalism and her slow essay serials, a distinctive serial form at the fin de siècle, which this article conceptualizes in closing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 173 - 202
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

My thanks to Dana Shaaban, Addie Levy Research Associate at TCU in 2019–20, for creating the tables in the appendix and for her other research assistance.

References

Works Cited

Brake, Laurel. “Pater, Walter (1839–1894).” In Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, edited by Brake, Laurel and Demoor, Marysa, 482–83. Gent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 2009.Google Scholar
Brake, Laurel. “The Serial and the Book in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Intersections, Extensions, Transformations.” Mémoires du Livre / Studies in Book Culture 8, no. 2 (2017): 1–16.Google Scholar
Brake, Laurel. Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. New York: NYU Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brake, Laurel. “Symons and Print Culture: Journalist, Critic, Book Maker.” Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 1 (2018): 74–88.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. London: Chapman and Hall, 1840.Google Scholar
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Colby, Vineta, and Colby, Robert. The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and the Victorian Literary Marketplace. Hamden: Archon Books, 1966.Google Scholar
Easley, Alexis. “Longman's Magazine (1882–1905).” In Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, edited by Brake, Laurel and Demoor, Marysa, 378–79. Gent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 2009.Google Scholar
Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, Dustin. Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Gagel, Amanda, ed. Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856–1935. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 2017.Google Scholar
Gagel, Amanda. “Selected Letters of Vernon Lee (1856–1935).” PhD diss., Boston University, 2008.Google Scholar
Gagnier, Regenia. Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gray, F. Elizabeth. “Alice Meynell: Production, Reproduction, and the World of Work in the 1890s.” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature 132 (2017): 148–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guy, Josephine, and Small, Ian. Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Houghton, Walter, ed. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900. Vols. 1–2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966.Google Scholar
Houghton, Walter, Houghton, Esther Rhoads, and Slingerland, Jean Harris, eds. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900. Volume 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Hughes, Linda K. Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Hughes, Linda K., and Lund, Michael C.. The Victorian Serial. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Kelleter, Frank. “Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality.” In Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Kelleter, Frank, 7–34. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kent, Christopher A. “Escott, Thomas Hay Sweet (1844–1924).” In Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, edited by Brake, Laurel and Demoor, Marysa, 206–7. Gent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 2009.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. Althea: A Second Book of Dialogues on Aspirations and Duties. London: Osgood, McIlvane, 1894.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “The Art of Raphael.” Art Journal, November 1883, 373–76.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. Baldwin: Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Æsthetical Questions. London: W. Satchell, [1881].Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. The Countess of Albany. London: W. H. Allen, 1884.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediæval in the Renaissance. 2 vols. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “The Influence of the Italian Renaissance on the Elizabethan Stage.” British Quarterly Review 150 (April 1882): 295–323.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “Italian Fiction.” Academy, July 14, 1883, 28–29.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “Metastasio's Letters.” Academy, November 17, 1883, 331–32.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. Ottilie: An Eighteenth Century Idyl. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1883.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “The Responsibilities of Unbelief: A Conversation between Three Rationalists.” Contemporary Review 43 (May 1883): 685–710.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. Review of Human Intercourse, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Academy, November 15, 1884, 315.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. Review of The Little Schoolmaster Mark: A Spiritual Romance, by J. M. Shorthouse. Academy, December 29, 1883, 426–27.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. Review of Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama, by J. A. Symonds. Academy, March 8, 1884, 159–60.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. London: W. Satchell, 1880.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “Taine's Philosophy of Art.” British Quarterly Review 68 (July 1878): 1–30.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “The Value of the Ideal: A Conversation.” National Review 6 (September 1885): 26–42.Google Scholar
Mannocchi, Phyllis F. “‘Vernon Lee’: A Reintroduction and Primary Bibliography.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 26, no. 4 (1983): 231–67.Google Scholar
McAleavey, Maia. “Behind the Victorian Novel: Scott's Chronicles.” Victorian Studies 61, no. 2 (2019): 232–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKay, Carol Hanbery. “A Journal of Her Own: The Rise and Fall of Annie Besant's Our Corner.” Victorian Periodicals Review 42, no. 4 (2009): 324–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Elizabeth C. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
“Mr. Unwin's List” (advertisement). Athenaeum, May 17, 1884, 620.Google Scholar
Mussell, James. “Repetition: Or, ‘In Our Last.’” Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (2015): 343–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Sullivan, Sean. “Six Elements of Serial Narrative.” Narrative 27, no. 1 (2019): 49–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pettitt, Clare. Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saint Victor, Carol de. “National Review, The (1883).” In British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, edited by Sullivan, Alvin, 242–50. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Small, L[aurence]. “The Nebular Hypothesis.” Our Corner 5 (January 1885): 33–38.Google Scholar
Stokes, John, and Turner, Mark, eds. Journalism I. Vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Symonds, John Addington. Renaissance in Italy: The Revival of Learning. London: Smith, Elder, 1877.Google Scholar
Turner, Mark W. “Seriality, Miscellaneity, and Compression in Nineteenth-Century Print.” Victorian Studies 62, no. 2 (2020): 283–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, Mark W.. “The Unruliness of Serials in the Nineteenth Century (and the Digital Age).” In Serialization in Popular Culture, edited by Allen, Rob and van den Berg, Thijs, 11–32. New York: Routledge, 2014.Google Scholar
Vadillo, Ana Parejo. “‘Lee, Vernon’ (1856–1935).” In Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, edited by Brake, Laurel and Demoor, Marysa, 352–53. Gent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 2009.Google Scholar
Zorn, Christa. Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003.Google Scholar