Vernon Lee made her entrance into English letters at a time when radical artists in Britain were challenging what they considered to be the moral orthodoxy, numbing materialism and conservative artistic tastes of Victorian society. From the socalled ‘Fleshly Controversy’ of 1871 to the violent public backlash against British Decadent art and artists that accompanied the prosecution of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency in 1895, the final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed heated debates in the press and in literature. On a few memorable occasions, in court between proponents of high art like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), writers and critics such as John Ruskin who conversely maintained that beauty had a moral and spiritual imperative to fulfil and an avowedly philistine and increasingly hostile public.

Accordingly, much of the fiction that Lee wrote in the 1880s and 1890s was formed by, and responded to, prevalent cultural debates about the morality and permissiveness of high art. Works such as Lee's first novel Miss Brown (1884), the novella A Phantom Lover’ (1886; reprinted as ‘Oke of Okehurst; Or, The Phantom Lover’ in 1890) and her Decadent fairytale ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady (1896) relayed her unique vision of the ethical and moral problems posed both by the literary avantgarde and the public reaction to it. In her fiction and her essays of this period, not only did Lee ask challenging questions about the artist's responsibility to his audience in terms of both the content and moral meaning of his work but more bravely she also asked the late-Victorian public to look beyond its ingrained prejudices and see whether anything that might benefit or improve society could be learned from the revolutionary ideas propounded by this so-called ‘new school’ of artists (GA, 74).

Since the inception of the PRB in 1848 and despite the speedy dissolution of the group, both the work and unconventional personal lives of its founding members (William Morris, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) continued to scandalize society for many years. In 1871, poems by Rossetti appeared for the first time in one volume and occasioned a powerful public attack from the poet and critic Robert Buchanan in his infamous review article ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Poems by D. G. Rossetti’ for the Contemporary Review.