October 8, 2018 • 34 mins
Violet Paget, more often known by her pen name Vernon Lee, was a historian and an art and literary critic, and she wrote on myriad subjects including music, travel, aesthetics, psychology and economics. And she was well known for her ghost stories.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry. Violet Paget,
who was more often known by her pen name Burning Lee,
(00:21):
was a historian and an art and literary critic, and
she wrote across all kinds of subjects, including music and
travel and esthetics and psychology and economics. And the reason
that we were talking about her in October ghost stories.
There maybe aren't quite as many ghost stories as I
was hoping when I embarked on this, but there are some. Yeah,
(00:43):
I'll take it. Violent Paget was born on October fourteenth,
the eighteen fifty six in Boulogne, Surmer, France. Her parents
were Henry Ferguson and Matilda Paget. And Matilda had been
married once before, to a Captain James Lee Hamilton's, who
died in eighteen fifty two. You. She had one son
from that first marriage, Eugene Lee Hamilton's, who was eleven
(01:05):
years older than Violet. Violet's father had been Eugene's tutor,
and since he had no money or background to speak of,
Matilda's family had been kind of shocked when she chose
to marry him. Yeah, Matilda was owed an inheritance, but
it was tied up in a very complicated legal dispute. So,
even though they were British citizens, the Pagets couldn't afford
to keep up a genteel lifestyle in England, especially not
(01:28):
one that would require them to maintain a home to
keep up with their neighbors in that home. They could, however,
afford that same basic level of comfort abroad. So Violet
and Eugene grew up in a somewhat eccentric, very wandering
existence in continental Europe. They moved from place to place,
and they lived off what little income Matilda did have,
(01:50):
staying in inns and rented rooms. But they weren't tourists.
Matilda was adamant that they were not tourists. Later in
her life here is Violet described it quote, we shifted
our quarters invariably every six months, and by dint of shifting,
crossed Europe's length and breadth in several directions. But this
(02:10):
was moving, not traveling, and we contemned all travelers. Violet's
mother really doated on Eugene, and she focused most of
her attention on Eugene's upbringing in education. Even after Eugene
went off to Oxford, Matilda was still way more attentive
to how he was doing than she was to violets studies.
(02:31):
Violet did have a series of governesses, but a lot
of time she was just left on her own and
to her own devices when it came to study. But
she was extremely bright, and she was very precocious, and
they were living all over Europe, so she became fluent
in English, French, Italian and German, and she taught herself
a wide range of subjects. While Violet's mother hated the
(02:54):
idea of being a tourist, that often wasn't the case
when it came to their various neighbors. When Violet was ten,
the family was in Niee and their neighbors included the
Sergeant family. That's including John Singer Sergeant also aged ten,
and his sister Emily, who was about a year younger.
And John's mother had taken the family to Niece for
(03:14):
the sake of her health, and she loved being a tourist.
She filled their days with all kinds of outings, including
to libraries and museums and historical points of interest, and
she made it a point to invite Violet along as well.
That same year that the Pagets met the Sergeant's, Eugene
dropped out of Oxford. This was a huge disappointment to
(03:36):
their mother, but it meant that Violet finally had an
adult to give her self education some more direction. Over
the next few years, Eugene played a big part in
Violet's course of study, and he also started to give
her feedback on her writing The Paget's and the Sergeant's
Crossed Paths repeatedly after meeting in Nice and Mrs Sergeant
encouraged all of the children to play right and draw together.
(03:59):
Violet and John weren't particularly close after they grew up,
although he did draw and paint her, but Violet and
Emily Sergeant remained close friends for the rest of their lives.
John Singer Sergeant portrait of Vernon Lee's is the art
for this episode on our website. I love it, yet
she reminds me of Chummy on Call the Midwife, which
(04:22):
I know is not a show that you were particularly into. You.
I don't watch it because of all the baby halvings. Yes,
that's not your thing. It is my thing. So it
was through all these art outings with the sergeants that
Violet started to become a lot more interested in history
and architecture and art. And this was particularly true when
(04:43):
both families were living in Rome. When Violet and John
were twelve, After walking through the streets and the historical
sites of Rome and becoming really immersed in its sense
of centuries of history, she really threw herself into studying it.
She also started writing more and arm and developing her
own imaginative side, both through writing and through play. For example,
(05:06):
she and John Singer Sergeant would read about things like
historical executions, and then they would act those out, like
what kid didn't do that, I'd love that story. Violet's
first published work came out when she was fourteen, and
it drew from her time in Rome and her study
of history and art there. It was written in French
and titled liz Aventures dun pas de monet or The
(05:30):
Adventures of a Coin, And as that title suggests, it's
a story told through the life of a coin. It
starts out in ancient Rome, and then the coin passes
from person to person through the centuries until it ends
up with a coin collector. This is obviously a fictional story,
but it's also deeply grounded in history, complete with footnotes.
(05:51):
The Adventures of a Coin came out serially in three
issues of the journal La Famia and May, June, and
July of eighteen seventy. Throughout her teens, Violet was ambitious, precocious,
and very focused. She kept on writing and getting her
work published, and in eighteen seventy three, when she was seventeen,
her family finally settled down into a permanent home, and
(06:14):
that home was in Florence, Italy. They moved into a
different house in Florence, known as Il Palmerino in eighty
two that is, weirdly lived for the rest of her life.
A big part in this shift from their perpetual wandering
to staying put was that Violet's mother had finally gotten
that inheritance she was owned, so now they could afford
(06:35):
all the associated costs that came along with maintaining a household.
They still didn't have a ton of money, though. One
of the reasons that they were in Florence was because
Italy was considered to be the cheapest place to live.
But another big part of it was that Eugene had
become seriously ill. He had started to experience an unexplained paralysis,
and so the family put down roots and he moved
(06:57):
home to be cared for by his mother and his sister.
Violet had enjoyed many of the places that they had
lived over all those years, but she really really loved Italy,
and to her it was just home. Violet adopted the
pseudonym Vernon Lee in eighteen seventy five, at the age
of nineteen, after her family had been living in Florence
for about two years, and we'll get to that after
(07:19):
a quick sponsor break. By the time Violet Paget started
using the pseudonym Vernon Lee in eighteen seventy five, it
was becoming a lot more common for women to publish
their work under their own names. Her peers and the
women who were acting as her literary mentors were publishing
(07:42):
as themselves, and while it wasn't necessarily completely acceptable socially
for a woman to be publishing her work, it also
wasn't practically mandatory for a woman to take on a
man's name in order to get published at all. But
Paget had moved on from writing things like the adventures
of a coin, and she was embarking in the world
of art criticism and aesthetics, which is the branch of
(08:04):
philosophy devoted to beauty, the nature of art, and artistic appreciation.
She was writing very dense technical work on academic subjects.
She had no formal education, She was still quite young,
and she hadn't developed any kind of name or reputation
for herself. In her words, written to novelist Henrietta Jenkin, quote,
(08:25):
no one reads a woman's writing on art, history or
aesthetics with anything but unmitigated contempt. This pen name she
adopted was the combination of Vernon because it started with
a V like Violet and Lee from her half brother's surname.
For a time she also used her father's initials, so
it was HP Vernon Lee. The first time she used
(08:46):
the pseudonym was in a series of articles and the
Italian journal Law revised to Europea or the European Magazine.
After those first articles as Vernon Lee, she never published
as Violet Paget again, even after people made connection that
Vernon Lee and Violet Paget were one and the same.
She did, however, use both names in her personal life,
(09:07):
including signing some letters with one name and others with
the other. The name Vernon Lee became increasingly recognized, though,
so going forward, we're going to use that name for
the rest of the podcast. Yeah, people handle her name differently.
Some people say Vernon Lee throughout one of the biographies
that I read, switched back and forth between whether they
were talking about her formal work or her social life.
(09:30):
Very interesting, I understand the idea, But yeah, it seems
like she was very fluid with both names. Yeah, but
for the interest of clarity, it's probably easiest to just
pick one and run with. Flipping back and forth in
an audio podcast seemed like it would be more confusing
than not. Regardless, though, eighteen eighty was a busy year
(09:51):
for Vernon Lee. She was twenty four and she published
a work called Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy.
Some of this book had been previously published a standalone essays,
and it was an exploration of eighteenth century Italian literature, theater,
and music, including opera and comedia dell arte. It was
deeply informed by years of trawling through bookstalls and libraries
(10:16):
looking for old copies of eighteenth century material. It was
also informed by Lee's study of and thoughts on esthetics,
and by her study of music. She had actually given
up music lessons when she was younger because she just
wasn't very good at it, and then she started them
again while working on this book so that she could
appreciate the technical elements of what she was writing about.
(10:40):
This book took English readers on a tour of eighteenth
century Italy, and it was very popular and generally well reviewed.
Its content and its reception also gave her access to
some prestigious artistic and literary circles. It was one of
the things that helped her develop an extensive network among
some of the foremost Victorian writers, artists, and philosophers. Yeah,
(11:02):
one of the things that people comment on about Vernon
Lee a lot, besides her writing is this extensive network
of basically everybody that was a prominent person in the
whole literary, artistic, and philosophical world at the time. She
she knew practically everyone. She also started a relationship with
another young writer named Mary Robinson. In eighty Robinson was
(11:25):
invited to stay with the Pagests in Florence, and soon
she was spending every autumn in Florence with Lee, and
Lee was spending every summer in London with her. Robinson
and Lee spent a lot of their time together working
side by sign, but Robinson's family was not particularly enthusiastic
about this relationship. This was a time when romantic friendships
(11:47):
were common and not particularly stigmatized, and at least at first,
nothing more was suspected. But Lee could be catty and tactless,
which the Robinson's simply did not approve of, and they
also somewhat taken advantage of, since it was through them
that Lee was meeting a lot of publishers for her work.
In eighteen eighty one, Lee published a work called Belcaro
(12:09):
being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions, which she dedicated to
Mary Robinson. The set of essays was very heavily influenced
by the esthetic philosophy of Walter Pater, who Lee met
that same year. Peter became one of Lee's very few
close male friends. In general, she had several close women friends,
(12:30):
almost no close male friends. He was also a huge
influence on her work. Leah was also for a time
friends with novelist Henry James. There's some speculation that James
wrote her into his novel Roderick Hudson, but she was
only nineteen when that book came out, so the timing
doesn't quite add up with when she then had access
(12:51):
to all of these people, But they were friends and
correspondence by the eighteen eighties. On September four, James wrote
a letter in which he said, quote, I don't think
I think Violet Paget great, but I think her a
most astounding young female and Euphorian, most fascinating and suggestive,
as well as monstrous clever. She has prodigious cerebration. Euphorian's
(13:16):
full title was Euphorian being Studies of the Antique and
Medieval in the Renaissance. It was similar to the eighteenth
Century Italy Book, but about the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
I love she has prodigious cerebration. But that same year,
(13:38):
also in eighteen eighty four, Lee published her first novel,
which was called Miss Brown. She and Henry James had
been corresponding while she was working on it, and James
knew that Lee was planning to dedicate it to him,
but when it came out he didn't like it. That's awkward. Uh.
He never related told Lee what he thought about it.
(13:59):
He sort of anst around his criticisms once he eventually
wrote her a letter, but before he did that, he
told basically everyone else how bad he thought it was.
In one letter, he wrote, quote, as I told you,
my modest name is on the dedication page, and my
tongue is therefore tied in speaking of it, at least generally.
(14:19):
But I may whisper in your ear that, as it
is her first attempt at a novel, so it is
to be hoped it may be her last. It is
very bad, strangely inferior to her other writing, and to
me at least painfully disagreeable in tone. Henry James was
not alone in this opinion. Overall, Miss Brown was very
widely panned. It was basically a Pygmalion story about a
(14:43):
poet and painter who finds the eponymous Anne Brown, who
was a servant girl, and he educates her with the
intention of marrying her, and so a lot of the
novel hinges on her decision and her deliberation of whether
she wants to marry him or not. Lee just didn't
put much separation between the real world inspirations for her characters.
(15:04):
And the characters themselves. It satirized the aesthetic movement that
was playing out in London, and there were a lot
of unflattering characters in the novel who had real life counterparts,
including Oscar Wilde that as a person I would not
want to make an enemy of Frankly Uh. These counterparts
were so obvious that people also interpreted similarities that weren't
(15:25):
intentional as being about them. People were particularly annoyed because
Lee was a relative newcomer to the London scene, so
they didn't think she had enough experience with it to
be justified in her criticisms. Lee also saw still more
controversy in eighty four with her publication of the Countess
of Albany, which was a biography of Charles Edward Stewart's
(15:48):
wife Louise. People were outraged over this biography because Lee
wrote about the Countess sympathetically, and she spelled out how
she was living at a time and in a place
where it was normal and expected or a woman to
have a lover. But to her English audience, the Countess
was just an adulteress who deserved neither sympathy nor respect.
(16:08):
Lee was still reeling from all this criticism when Mary
Robinson married James Darmastator in seven ending their seven year relationship.
Darmastator had read and appreciated some of Robinson's work, and
they had gotten engaged after corresponding for just a few months.
No one except the couple was in favor of this match.
(16:31):
The Padgets had really taken for granted that Robinson would
never marry and that her relationship with Lee would just
go on indefinitely. The Robinson's disapproved because Dharmastator was Jewish,
from a poor family, and disabled due to a spinal
disease he had had as a child. Also, a whole
lot of people pointed out that they had only met
in person like three times before they got engaged. I
(16:54):
am not in a position to judge that. Uh. Lee
was absolutely Lee heartbroken when Robinson married, but almost immediately
she began a new relationship with Clementina and Strucor Thompson,
who was known as Kit. It is not clear whether
she pronounced this Ainster and Strucor or some other variation.
(17:17):
She was from Scotland, and there is a town in
Scotland where locals say Ainster but everyone else does not.
So apologies if I have offended anyone's ear. We don't
mean to make your ears bleed when we say this name,
and Strether Thompson basically waited out the end of Lee's
relationship with Mary Robinson. Lee had asked her mother to
(17:39):
invite Anstruther Thompson to stay with them in Florence once
she heard about this engagement. Once the rest of the
padgets also knew about the engagement, she asked again, saying, quote,
you will understand now why it would make me utterly
miserable if I were not permitted to have this woman
in Florence. And answer there. Thompson patiently tended Lee through
(18:02):
her heartbreak. Robinson's wedding was in March of eight eight,
and by about June and st The Thompson had taken
her place in Vernon Lee's life. This was a turning
point in Lee's life. And we're going to get to
the next phase and those ghost stories we promised you
after we first have a little bit of a sponsor break.
(18:28):
Even though she was bolstered through her relationship with kit
Aster The Thompson, Vernon Lee's output really dipped for a
while after Mary Robinson announced her engagement in eight seven,
Lee had always been prone to anxiety and illnesses, and
over the years she had also had a series of
mental breakdowns, but those years after Robinson got engaged and
(18:50):
married were particularly hard. For almost ten years. A lot
of her publications, especially the more academic ones, were previously
published essays. This was, however, when she wrote most of
her supernatural stories. This wasn't totally new territory for her.
Earlier in the show, we mentioned her collection of essays
Belkaro being essays on sundry aesthetical questions from back in
(19:14):
one and one of the essays was Faustus and Helena
Notes on the supernatural in art. Here's a quote from
that quote. We none of us believe in ghosts as
logical possibilities, but we most of us conceive them as
imaginative probabilities. We can still feel the ghostly, and thence
it is that a ghost is the only thing which can,
(19:36):
in any respect replace for us the divinities of old
and enable us to understand, if only for a minute,
the imaginative power which they possessed, and of which they
were despoiled not only by logic but by art. By ghost.
We do not mean the vulgar apparition which is seen
or heard in told or written tales. We mean the ghost,
(19:58):
which slowly rises is up in our mind, the haunter
not of corridors and staircases, but of our fancies and
a t nine, Lee published a collection of four supernatural
stories called Hauntings, and the preface runs along a very
similar theme to that earlier essay. She writes about the
trope of the horrible family secret that's revealed to every
(20:21):
member of the family on their twenty one birthday, quote
so terrible as to overshadow his subsequent life. She writes
about how the dread of this terrible secret is so
much worse than whatever the reality can be. She goes
on to say that quote, it seems to me that
the supernatural, in order to call forth these sensations terrible
(20:44):
to our ancestors and terrible but delicious to ourselves, skeptical
posterity must necessarily, and with few exceptions, remain en wrapped
in mystery. She ends the preface, Hence, my four little
tale are of no genuine ghosts in the scientific sense.
They tell of no hauntings such as could be contributed
(21:06):
by the Society of Psychical Research, of no specters that
can be caught in definite places and made to dictate
judicial evidence. My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts,
according to me, the only genuine ones of whom I
can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains
and have haunted, among others, my own and my friends.
(21:29):
The stories in her collection, along with most of her
other supernatural stories, piece together events that are increasingly odd
and eerie and foreboding and oppressive, and they're also really
deeply connected to the place where the story is set.
Oak of oak Hurst or The Phantom Lover, which was
originally published as A Phantom Lover a Fantastic Story, is
(21:51):
the only one of these stories that said in England,
and it's set in a creepy old manor house. It
draws off from a lot of the tropes of an
English story set in a creepy old manner else but
the rest are said in Italy, Spain or Germany, and
they draw extensively from history and myth and folklore, and
often there's an underpinning of some fictional historical facts that
(22:12):
are pointed out as facts, and they make it seem
more real. A few examples of these stories which were
mostly written between eighteen eighty nine and nineteen o two.
Uh amor Dure is written in the form of a diary.
It is about a historian who becomes increasingly fixated on
and enamored with a historical woman he is researching named
(22:33):
Medeia Dacarpi. Dianea is a series of letters detailing these
strange and violent events surrounding a young girl who was
the only survivor of a shipwreck. Prince Alberic and the
Snake Lady features a young boy who becomes more and
more preoccupied with a story about how his namesake ancestor
rescued a woman from being enchanted as a snake, which
(22:55):
was also depicted on a tapestry in his grandfather's home.
Just as a side note, Vernon Lee's half brother, Eugene
Lee Hamilton's was a writer as well. He also wrote
gothic and supernatural stories. Others his tended to be a
lot more lurid and a lot less psychological than his sisters.
I read a couple of these stories while I was
working on this. I feel like they hold up pretty well,
(23:18):
hers or his or both hers. I did not read
any of his Gotcha. I just read there the description
that in general, they tended to be a lot more,
a lot more along the lines of here is the
creepy ghost obviously supernatural happening, while Lee's tended to be
more like, there's some unexplained elements here, but this person
is also being tormented by their own mind. Right, and
(23:40):
ghost stories were not the only thing that Lee was
writing at the end of the nineteenth century. In two
she wrote the story that finally put the nail in
the coffin of her friendship with Henry James, who was
called Lady Tal, and they came out in a collection
called Vanitas Polite Stories. Lady Tall included a transparent an
unflattering fictionalization of Henry James, and this time James did
(24:04):
not read it. He heard about it, decided he would
rather not know, and that he was done. He later
wrote his brother in a letter in which he said
it was quote particularly impudent and blaggardly sort of thing
to do to a friend, and one who has treated
her with such particular consideration as I have. She's a
tiger cat, which to me is like a great compliment.
(24:26):
But that's maybe not what he intended. Vernon Lee and
Kit anstrutherir Thompson also worked together on a theory of
aesthetics at the end of the nineteenth century. It was
drawn from Kit's own awareness of her body's physical responses
while looking at art. This was connected to the German
concept of in fuelung or feeling into It's one of
(24:47):
the first English language explorations of the idea of empathy
and the context of aesthetics. They published an essay on
this work that was called Beauty and Ugliness. In was
rooted in the idea that these physical responses are the
work of a person's body subconsciously mimicking or living through
(25:08):
what you're seeing in the art. This was unfortunately the
end of their relationship as well. Art historian and critic
Bernard Berenson had been working on some similar ideas, and
he accused both women of plagiarism. He later admitted that
his accusations had been baseless, but the stress of the
accusation took such a tool on Anstruther Thompson that she
(25:32):
had a mental breakdown. She went back to Scotland shortly
before Beauty and Ugliness was published. Although this wasn't amicable
split and the two women stayed in touch for the
rest of kid's life. This was the third in a
series of upsets for Lee that came pretty closely together.
Her friend and mentor, Walter Pater, died in her mother
(25:53):
died in and with her mother's death, Lee took on
the primary responsibility for caring for her other Eugene, who
was still very ill. This was something that she continued
to do until he got married in he just noted
died in seven. To console herself through all of this,
Lee also turned to travel writing. She traveled extensively around Europe,
(26:17):
although mostly took conventional places, and she seemed to find
some comfort in writing about it, and she bought Il
pal Marino in nineteen o six. By the nineteen teens,
Lee had worked in so many fields and across so
many genres. There was art, history, art criticism, history, philosophy, fiction,
and on and and on and on. Both she and
(26:38):
her mother had also been ardent anti vivisectionists and campaigners
for animal rights. But as World War One approached, Lee
increasingly focused on advocating pacifism, including writing anti war literature,
and this was of course highly criticized, and even among pacifists,
Lee was something of a loner. She distance herself from
(27:00):
people whose pacifism was radical or religiously motivated, and she
was isolated from her home as well. She was in
England when the war began in nineteen fourteen, and she
wasn't able to get back to Italy until after it
was over. During the war, she joined and wrote for
the Union of Democratic Control or the u d C.
(27:21):
The u DC was a British organization that called for
reduced armaments and the creation of an organization among European
nations designed to prevent future warfare, along with a treaty
at the end of the war that did not redraw
all the borders or humiliate the defeated nations. Of course,
the Treaty of Versailles did the opposite, and Lee, having
(27:42):
lived in Germany at several points in her life, was
just certain that the terms of the Treaty of Versailles
that were meant to punish Germany, we're really going to
cause and not prevent, future conflict. Because she knew what
she was talking about. She did. Most of Lee's writing
during and after World War One was about pacifism. In
(28:03):
nineteen fifteen, she wrote an allegory called the ballet of
Nations of present day morality, and in nineteen twenties she
published Satan the Waiter of Philosophic War trilogy. But by
this point both she and her output were slowing down.
She was getting older, and although she was still able
to travel once the war ended, she typically only went
(28:24):
to places that she had been before. In nineteen twenty,
Lee realized that the main villa at il Palmrino had
become much too big for her, and rather than sell
the whole property, she moved into one of the cottages
there that a friend had rented from her and improved.
It was the sort of property that had a main
villa and then several farm cottages that tenant farmers could
(28:44):
live in, and she moved into one of those that
had been fixed up a bit. When Kit answer to
their Thompson died in one Lee became her literary executor.
Mary Robinson was also widowed, remarried, and then widowed again,
but she and Lee never really rekindled their relationship. During
her fifty three years writing, Vernon Lee wrote more than
(29:05):
thirty works of non fiction, four novels, four volumes of
short stories, and a play, as well as essays and letters.
This was a massive output, especially considering that some of
it was very dense and academic and she had no
formal education. She also had ongoing relationships and lengthy correspondences
with people like H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, and Mary Cassatt.
(29:29):
She died in Italy on February five. She'd become chronically ill,
and she had lost most of her hearing. Not long
before her death, she told her own literary executor that
she felt like quote an alien, having no ties either
of nation, blood, class, or profession. The older she got,
the more she felt like she had just sort of
(29:50):
been born in the slightly wrong era. She wished she
had been born a little later, and then she could
have been like a modern woman of letters, rather than
being the sort of odd Victorian outlier. A lot of
her papers are at Colby College in Maine, which is
kind of ironic because she never traveled to the U S.
(30:11):
Having lived through World War One, she was very concerned
about the idea of her work being destroyed in a war,
and her literary executor, Irene Cooper Willis, decided Colby would
be the safest place today. A lot of Lee's work
and aesthetics seems somewhat dated, but a lot of her
other work, especially her histories and her supernatural stories, have
(30:31):
held up a lot better. Those supernatural stories have variously
been reissued, and some have been included in collections into
the twentieth century. You can also find a ton of
this work on the internet for free. The Stories Hauntings
is available I think at Project Guttenberg pretty easily um
(30:52):
and is a fun collection of ghostly short stories to read.
Some of the other work is again very dense, especially
the more philosophical stuff. Do you have some listener mail
for us today? Hi? Sure do? I have two quick
emails that are both about air conditioning and school. What
(31:17):
is from Mary? Mary says greeting Stracy and Holly. I
was listening to your A C podcast while getting ready
for work, and I just had to tell you what's
happening right now. I, like both of you, grew up
in the South. My classrooms had window units and the
halls were oppressive, with the exception of a newer building
with central air. My glasses, which were new to me
my junior year, fogged up when I went from the
(31:38):
classrooms to the halls. I live in central Pennsylvania now
and school just started. While we've had a very wet summer,
we've just hit a bit of a heat wave and
three days in several schools were having early dismissal because
of the heat and the lack of a c in schools.
You couldn't have timed this podcast better. She uh makes
a note about the idea of a episode suggestion, and
(32:01):
then says thanks for all the great stories you share, Mary,
and then on a similar note, we have one that
is from Sally, and Sally says, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
I love your show. I was listening to the episode
on air conditioning and had to write in when I
heard you talking about your schools having or not having
air conditioning. I am from Australia, where the summer days
regularly reached thirty six degrees celsius, and went to high
(32:23):
school from two thousand three. No air conditioning is pretty
standard in Australian schools. Even my expensive private high school
had only one building that was air conditioned. There's an
urban myth popular with Australian school children that if it
gets over forty degrees celsius, everyone gets to go home
from school. To my knowledge, that has never actually happened,
although there are always rumors that it happened once in Melbourne,
(32:46):
so it may just be true. And then the letter
says it's a hot, dry heat, and Melbourne not muggy
and human like it is here. I know I don't
sound like an Australian person when I say the name
of that city. By the way, anyway, I just thought
you might find this thing I'm using best Sally. Thank
you so much Sally and Mary for sending these notes.
I was particularly delighted because we've got a several emails
(33:09):
that were all about air conditioning in school, and because
Mary was talking about how hot it was when this
episode came out. I recorded the air conditioning episode with
ice packs literally held onto my body because it was
so hot. Um because like to record a podcast, you
have to be in a quiet place, which means closing
all the doors and windows and everything. And then the
day that the episode came out, it was just as
(33:31):
hot as as it had been the day that we
recorded it. So that day I think we didn't I
wasn't recording anything that day. I was able to like
hide in an in an air conditioned place from the heat,
so uh. Thanks to everyone who has written to us
about air conditioning in or not in their schools. If
you would like to write to us about this or
(33:52):
any other podcast, where a history podcast at how stuff
works dot com. And then we are all over social
media as miss in History. That's where you'll find our
Facebook and our Twitter, and our Instagram and our Pinterest.
You can come to our website which is missed in
History dot com, or you will find show notes for
the episodes that Holly and I have worked on together
that will include some links to Vernon Lee's various work
(34:13):
in this one. You can also find a searchable archive
of every episode ever and you can do all of
that at Miston history dot com. And you can subscribe
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and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot
(34:34):
com
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry. Violet Paget,
who was more often known by her pen name Burning Lee,
(00:21):
was a historian and an art and literary critic, and
she wrote across all kinds of subjects, including music and
travel and esthetics and psychology and economics. And the reason
that we were talking about her in October ghost stories.
There maybe aren't quite as many ghost stories as I
was hoping when I embarked on this, but there are some. Yeah,
(00:43):
I'll take it. Violent Paget was born on October fourteenth,
the eighteen fifty six in Boulogne, Surmer, France. Her parents
were Henry Ferguson and Matilda Paget. And Matilda had been
married once before, to a Captain James Lee Hamilton's, who
died in eighteen fifty two. You. She had one son
from that first marriage, Eugene Lee Hamilton's, who was eleven
(01:05):
years older than Violet. Violet's father had been Eugene's tutor,
and since he had no money or background to speak of,
Matilda's family had been kind of shocked when she chose
to marry him. Yeah, Matilda was owed an inheritance, but
it was tied up in a very complicated legal dispute. So,
even though they were British citizens, the Pagets couldn't afford
to keep up a genteel lifestyle in England, especially not
(01:28):
one that would require them to maintain a home to
keep up with their neighbors in that home. They could, however,
afford that same basic level of comfort abroad. So Violet
and Eugene grew up in a somewhat eccentric, very wandering
existence in continental Europe. They moved from place to place,
and they lived off what little income Matilda did have,
(01:50):
staying in inns and rented rooms. But they weren't tourists.
Matilda was adamant that they were not tourists. Later in
her life here is Violet described it quote, we shifted
our quarters invariably every six months, and by dint of shifting,
crossed Europe's length and breadth in several directions. But this
(02:10):
was moving, not traveling, and we contemned all travelers. Violet's
mother really doated on Eugene, and she focused most of
her attention on Eugene's upbringing in education. Even after Eugene
went off to Oxford, Matilda was still way more attentive
to how he was doing than she was to violets studies.
(02:31):
Violet did have a series of governesses, but a lot
of time she was just left on her own and
to her own devices when it came to study. But
she was extremely bright, and she was very precocious, and
they were living all over Europe, so she became fluent
in English, French, Italian and German, and she taught herself
a wide range of subjects. While Violet's mother hated the
(02:54):
idea of being a tourist, that often wasn't the case
when it came to their various neighbors. When Violet was ten,
the family was in Niee and their neighbors included the
Sergeant family. That's including John Singer Sergeant also aged ten,
and his sister Emily, who was about a year younger.
And John's mother had taken the family to Niece for
(03:14):
the sake of her health, and she loved being a tourist.
She filled their days with all kinds of outings, including
to libraries and museums and historical points of interest, and
she made it a point to invite Violet along as well.
That same year that the Pagets met the Sergeant's, Eugene
dropped out of Oxford. This was a huge disappointment to
(03:36):
their mother, but it meant that Violet finally had an
adult to give her self education some more direction. Over
the next few years, Eugene played a big part in
Violet's course of study, and he also started to give
her feedback on her writing The Paget's and the Sergeant's
Crossed Paths repeatedly after meeting in Nice and Mrs Sergeant
encouraged all of the children to play right and draw together.
(03:59):
Violet and John weren't particularly close after they grew up,
although he did draw and paint her, but Violet and
Emily Sergeant remained close friends for the rest of their lives.
John Singer Sergeant portrait of Vernon Lee's is the art
for this episode on our website. I love it, yet
she reminds me of Chummy on Call the Midwife, which
(04:22):
I know is not a show that you were particularly into. You.
I don't watch it because of all the baby halvings. Yes,
that's not your thing. It is my thing. So it
was through all these art outings with the sergeants that
Violet started to become a lot more interested in history
and architecture and art. And this was particularly true when
(04:43):
both families were living in Rome. When Violet and John
were twelve, After walking through the streets and the historical
sites of Rome and becoming really immersed in its sense
of centuries of history, she really threw herself into studying it.
She also started writing more and arm and developing her
own imaginative side, both through writing and through play. For example,
(05:06):
she and John Singer Sergeant would read about things like
historical executions, and then they would act those out, like
what kid didn't do that, I'd love that story. Violet's
first published work came out when she was fourteen, and
it drew from her time in Rome and her study
of history and art there. It was written in French
and titled liz Aventures dun pas de monet or The
(05:30):
Adventures of a Coin, And as that title suggests, it's
a story told through the life of a coin. It
starts out in ancient Rome, and then the coin passes
from person to person through the centuries until it ends
up with a coin collector. This is obviously a fictional story,
but it's also deeply grounded in history, complete with footnotes.
(05:51):
The Adventures of a Coin came out serially in three
issues of the journal La Famia and May, June, and
July of eighteen seventy. Throughout her teens, Violet was ambitious, precocious,
and very focused. She kept on writing and getting her
work published, and in eighteen seventy three, when she was seventeen,
her family finally settled down into a permanent home, and
(06:14):
that home was in Florence, Italy. They moved into a
different house in Florence, known as Il Palmerino in eighty
two that is, weirdly lived for the rest of her life.
A big part in this shift from their perpetual wandering
to staying put was that Violet's mother had finally gotten
that inheritance she was owned, so now they could afford
(06:35):
all the associated costs that came along with maintaining a household.
They still didn't have a ton of money, though. One
of the reasons that they were in Florence was because
Italy was considered to be the cheapest place to live.
But another big part of it was that Eugene had
become seriously ill. He had started to experience an unexplained paralysis,
and so the family put down roots and he moved
(06:57):
home to be cared for by his mother and his sister.
Violet had enjoyed many of the places that they had
lived over all those years, but she really really loved Italy,
and to her it was just home. Violet adopted the
pseudonym Vernon Lee in eighteen seventy five, at the age
of nineteen, after her family had been living in Florence
for about two years, and we'll get to that after
(07:19):
a quick sponsor break. By the time Violet Paget started
using the pseudonym Vernon Lee in eighteen seventy five, it
was becoming a lot more common for women to publish
their work under their own names. Her peers and the
women who were acting as her literary mentors were publishing
(07:42):
as themselves, and while it wasn't necessarily completely acceptable socially
for a woman to be publishing her work, it also
wasn't practically mandatory for a woman to take on a
man's name in order to get published at all. But
Paget had moved on from writing things like the adventures
of a coin, and she was embarking in the world
of art criticism and aesthetics, which is the branch of
(08:04):
philosophy devoted to beauty, the nature of art, and artistic appreciation.
She was writing very dense technical work on academic subjects.
She had no formal education, She was still quite young,
and she hadn't developed any kind of name or reputation
for herself. In her words, written to novelist Henrietta Jenkin, quote,
(08:25):
no one reads a woman's writing on art, history or
aesthetics with anything but unmitigated contempt. This pen name she
adopted was the combination of Vernon because it started with
a V like Violet and Lee from her half brother's surname.
For a time she also used her father's initials, so
it was HP Vernon Lee. The first time she used
(08:46):
the pseudonym was in a series of articles and the
Italian journal Law revised to Europea or the European Magazine.
After those first articles as Vernon Lee, she never published
as Violet Paget again, even after people made connection that
Vernon Lee and Violet Paget were one and the same.
She did, however, use both names in her personal life,
(09:07):
including signing some letters with one name and others with
the other. The name Vernon Lee became increasingly recognized, though,
so going forward, we're going to use that name for
the rest of the podcast. Yeah, people handle her name differently.
Some people say Vernon Lee throughout one of the biographies
that I read, switched back and forth between whether they
were talking about her formal work or her social life.
(09:30):
Very interesting, I understand the idea, But yeah, it seems
like she was very fluid with both names. Yeah, but
for the interest of clarity, it's probably easiest to just
pick one and run with. Flipping back and forth in
an audio podcast seemed like it would be more confusing
than not. Regardless, though, eighteen eighty was a busy year
(09:51):
for Vernon Lee. She was twenty four and she published
a work called Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy.
Some of this book had been previously published a standalone essays,
and it was an exploration of eighteenth century Italian literature, theater,
and music, including opera and comedia dell arte. It was
deeply informed by years of trawling through bookstalls and libraries
(10:16):
looking for old copies of eighteenth century material. It was
also informed by Lee's study of and thoughts on esthetics,
and by her study of music. She had actually given
up music lessons when she was younger because she just
wasn't very good at it, and then she started them
again while working on this book so that she could
appreciate the technical elements of what she was writing about.
(10:40):
This book took English readers on a tour of eighteenth
century Italy, and it was very popular and generally well reviewed.
Its content and its reception also gave her access to
some prestigious artistic and literary circles. It was one of
the things that helped her develop an extensive network among
some of the foremost Victorian writers, artists, and philosophers. Yeah,
(11:02):
one of the things that people comment on about Vernon
Lee a lot, besides her writing is this extensive network
of basically everybody that was a prominent person in the
whole literary, artistic, and philosophical world at the time. She
she knew practically everyone. She also started a relationship with
another young writer named Mary Robinson. In eighty Robinson was
(11:25):
invited to stay with the Pagests in Florence, and soon
she was spending every autumn in Florence with Lee, and
Lee was spending every summer in London with her. Robinson
and Lee spent a lot of their time together working
side by sign, but Robinson's family was not particularly enthusiastic
about this relationship. This was a time when romantic friendships
(11:47):
were common and not particularly stigmatized, and at least at first,
nothing more was suspected. But Lee could be catty and tactless,
which the Robinson's simply did not approve of, and they
also somewhat taken advantage of, since it was through them
that Lee was meeting a lot of publishers for her work.
In eighteen eighty one, Lee published a work called Belcaro
(12:09):
being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions, which she dedicated to
Mary Robinson. The set of essays was very heavily influenced
by the esthetic philosophy of Walter Pater, who Lee met
that same year. Peter became one of Lee's very few
close male friends. In general, she had several close women friends,
(12:30):
almost no close male friends. He was also a huge
influence on her work. Leah was also for a time
friends with novelist Henry James. There's some speculation that James
wrote her into his novel Roderick Hudson, but she was
only nineteen when that book came out, so the timing
doesn't quite add up with when she then had access
(12:51):
to all of these people, But they were friends and
correspondence by the eighteen eighties. On September four, James wrote
a letter in which he said, quote, I don't think
I think Violet Paget great, but I think her a
most astounding young female and Euphorian, most fascinating and suggestive,
as well as monstrous clever. She has prodigious cerebration. Euphorian's
(13:16):
full title was Euphorian being Studies of the Antique and
Medieval in the Renaissance. It was similar to the eighteenth
Century Italy Book, but about the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
I love she has prodigious cerebration. But that same year,
(13:38):
also in eighteen eighty four, Lee published her first novel,
which was called Miss Brown. She and Henry James had
been corresponding while she was working on it, and James
knew that Lee was planning to dedicate it to him,
but when it came out he didn't like it. That's awkward. Uh.
He never related told Lee what he thought about it.
(13:59):
He sort of anst around his criticisms once he eventually
wrote her a letter, but before he did that, he
told basically everyone else how bad he thought it was.
In one letter, he wrote, quote, as I told you,
my modest name is on the dedication page, and my
tongue is therefore tied in speaking of it, at least generally.
(14:19):
But I may whisper in your ear that, as it
is her first attempt at a novel, so it is
to be hoped it may be her last. It is
very bad, strangely inferior to her other writing, and to
me at least painfully disagreeable in tone. Henry James was
not alone in this opinion. Overall, Miss Brown was very
widely panned. It was basically a Pygmalion story about a
(14:43):
poet and painter who finds the eponymous Anne Brown, who
was a servant girl, and he educates her with the
intention of marrying her, and so a lot of the
novel hinges on her decision and her deliberation of whether
she wants to marry him or not. Lee just didn't
put much separation between the real world inspirations for her characters.
(15:04):
And the characters themselves. It satirized the aesthetic movement that
was playing out in London, and there were a lot
of unflattering characters in the novel who had real life counterparts,
including Oscar Wilde that as a person I would not
want to make an enemy of Frankly Uh. These counterparts
were so obvious that people also interpreted similarities that weren't
(15:25):
intentional as being about them. People were particularly annoyed because
Lee was a relative newcomer to the London scene, so
they didn't think she had enough experience with it to
be justified in her criticisms. Lee also saw still more
controversy in eighty four with her publication of the Countess
of Albany, which was a biography of Charles Edward Stewart's
(15:48):
wife Louise. People were outraged over this biography because Lee
wrote about the Countess sympathetically, and she spelled out how
she was living at a time and in a place
where it was normal and expected or a woman to
have a lover. But to her English audience, the Countess
was just an adulteress who deserved neither sympathy nor respect.
(16:08):
Lee was still reeling from all this criticism when Mary
Robinson married James Darmastator in seven ending their seven year relationship.
Darmastator had read and appreciated some of Robinson's work, and
they had gotten engaged after corresponding for just a few months.
No one except the couple was in favor of this match.
(16:31):
The Padgets had really taken for granted that Robinson would
never marry and that her relationship with Lee would just
go on indefinitely. The Robinson's disapproved because Dharmastator was Jewish,
from a poor family, and disabled due to a spinal
disease he had had as a child. Also, a whole
lot of people pointed out that they had only met
in person like three times before they got engaged. I
(16:54):
am not in a position to judge that. Uh. Lee
was absolutely Lee heartbroken when Robinson married, but almost immediately
she began a new relationship with Clementina and Strucor Thompson,
who was known as Kit. It is not clear whether
she pronounced this Ainster and Strucor or some other variation.
(17:17):
She was from Scotland, and there is a town in
Scotland where locals say Ainster but everyone else does not.
So apologies if I have offended anyone's ear. We don't
mean to make your ears bleed when we say this name,
and Strether Thompson basically waited out the end of Lee's
relationship with Mary Robinson. Lee had asked her mother to
(17:39):
invite Anstruther Thompson to stay with them in Florence once
she heard about this engagement. Once the rest of the
padgets also knew about the engagement, she asked again, saying, quote,
you will understand now why it would make me utterly
miserable if I were not permitted to have this woman
in Florence. And answer there. Thompson patiently tended Lee through
(18:02):
her heartbreak. Robinson's wedding was in March of eight eight,
and by about June and st The Thompson had taken
her place in Vernon Lee's life. This was a turning
point in Lee's life. And we're going to get to
the next phase and those ghost stories we promised you
after we first have a little bit of a sponsor break.
(18:28):
Even though she was bolstered through her relationship with kit
Aster The Thompson, Vernon Lee's output really dipped for a
while after Mary Robinson announced her engagement in eight seven,
Lee had always been prone to anxiety and illnesses, and
over the years she had also had a series of
mental breakdowns, but those years after Robinson got engaged and
(18:50):
married were particularly hard. For almost ten years. A lot
of her publications, especially the more academic ones, were previously
published essays. This was, however, when she wrote most of
her supernatural stories. This wasn't totally new territory for her.
Earlier in the show, we mentioned her collection of essays
Belkaro being essays on sundry aesthetical questions from back in
(19:14):
one and one of the essays was Faustus and Helena
Notes on the supernatural in art. Here's a quote from
that quote. We none of us believe in ghosts as
logical possibilities, but we most of us conceive them as
imaginative probabilities. We can still feel the ghostly, and thence
it is that a ghost is the only thing which can,
(19:36):
in any respect replace for us the divinities of old
and enable us to understand, if only for a minute,
the imaginative power which they possessed, and of which they
were despoiled not only by logic but by art. By ghost.
We do not mean the vulgar apparition which is seen
or heard in told or written tales. We mean the ghost,
(19:58):
which slowly rises is up in our mind, the haunter
not of corridors and staircases, but of our fancies and
a t nine, Lee published a collection of four supernatural
stories called Hauntings, and the preface runs along a very
similar theme to that earlier essay. She writes about the
trope of the horrible family secret that's revealed to every
(20:21):
member of the family on their twenty one birthday, quote
so terrible as to overshadow his subsequent life. She writes
about how the dread of this terrible secret is so
much worse than whatever the reality can be. She goes
on to say that quote, it seems to me that
the supernatural, in order to call forth these sensations terrible
(20:44):
to our ancestors and terrible but delicious to ourselves, skeptical
posterity must necessarily, and with few exceptions, remain en wrapped
in mystery. She ends the preface, Hence, my four little
tale are of no genuine ghosts in the scientific sense.
They tell of no hauntings such as could be contributed
(21:06):
by the Society of Psychical Research, of no specters that
can be caught in definite places and made to dictate
judicial evidence. My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts,
according to me, the only genuine ones of whom I
can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains
and have haunted, among others, my own and my friends.
(21:29):
The stories in her collection, along with most of her
other supernatural stories, piece together events that are increasingly odd
and eerie and foreboding and oppressive, and they're also really
deeply connected to the place where the story is set.
Oak of oak Hurst or The Phantom Lover, which was
originally published as A Phantom Lover a Fantastic Story, is
(21:51):
the only one of these stories that said in England,
and it's set in a creepy old manor house. It
draws off from a lot of the tropes of an
English story set in a creepy old manner else but
the rest are said in Italy, Spain or Germany, and
they draw extensively from history and myth and folklore, and
often there's an underpinning of some fictional historical facts that
(22:12):
are pointed out as facts, and they make it seem
more real. A few examples of these stories which were
mostly written between eighteen eighty nine and nineteen o two.
Uh amor Dure is written in the form of a diary.
It is about a historian who becomes increasingly fixated on
and enamored with a historical woman he is researching named
(22:33):
Medeia Dacarpi. Dianea is a series of letters detailing these
strange and violent events surrounding a young girl who was
the only survivor of a shipwreck. Prince Alberic and the
Snake Lady features a young boy who becomes more and
more preoccupied with a story about how his namesake ancestor
rescued a woman from being enchanted as a snake, which
(22:55):
was also depicted on a tapestry in his grandfather's home.
Just as a side note, Vernon Lee's half brother, Eugene
Lee Hamilton's was a writer as well. He also wrote
gothic and supernatural stories. Others his tended to be a
lot more lurid and a lot less psychological than his sisters.
I read a couple of these stories while I was
working on this. I feel like they hold up pretty well,
(23:18):
hers or his or both hers. I did not read
any of his Gotcha. I just read there the description
that in general, they tended to be a lot more,
a lot more along the lines of here is the
creepy ghost obviously supernatural happening, while Lee's tended to be
more like, there's some unexplained elements here, but this person
is also being tormented by their own mind. Right, and
(23:40):
ghost stories were not the only thing that Lee was
writing at the end of the nineteenth century. In two
she wrote the story that finally put the nail in
the coffin of her friendship with Henry James, who was
called Lady Tal, and they came out in a collection
called Vanitas Polite Stories. Lady Tall included a transparent an
unflattering fictionalization of Henry James, and this time James did
(24:04):
not read it. He heard about it, decided he would
rather not know, and that he was done. He later
wrote his brother in a letter in which he said
it was quote particularly impudent and blaggardly sort of thing
to do to a friend, and one who has treated
her with such particular consideration as I have. She's a
tiger cat, which to me is like a great compliment.
(24:26):
But that's maybe not what he intended. Vernon Lee and
Kit anstrutherir Thompson also worked together on a theory of
aesthetics at the end of the nineteenth century. It was
drawn from Kit's own awareness of her body's physical responses
while looking at art. This was connected to the German
concept of in fuelung or feeling into It's one of
(24:47):
the first English language explorations of the idea of empathy
and the context of aesthetics. They published an essay on
this work that was called Beauty and Ugliness. In was
rooted in the idea that these physical responses are the
work of a person's body subconsciously mimicking or living through
(25:08):
what you're seeing in the art. This was unfortunately the
end of their relationship as well. Art historian and critic
Bernard Berenson had been working on some similar ideas, and
he accused both women of plagiarism. He later admitted that
his accusations had been baseless, but the stress of the
accusation took such a tool on Anstruther Thompson that she
(25:32):
had a mental breakdown. She went back to Scotland shortly
before Beauty and Ugliness was published. Although this wasn't amicable
split and the two women stayed in touch for the
rest of kid's life. This was the third in a
series of upsets for Lee that came pretty closely together.
Her friend and mentor, Walter Pater, died in her mother
(25:53):
died in and with her mother's death, Lee took on
the primary responsibility for caring for her other Eugene, who
was still very ill. This was something that she continued
to do until he got married in he just noted
died in seven. To console herself through all of this,
Lee also turned to travel writing. She traveled extensively around Europe,
(26:17):
although mostly took conventional places, and she seemed to find
some comfort in writing about it, and she bought Il
pal Marino in nineteen o six. By the nineteen teens,
Lee had worked in so many fields and across so
many genres. There was art, history, art criticism, history, philosophy, fiction,
and on and and on and on. Both she and
(26:38):
her mother had also been ardent anti vivisectionists and campaigners
for animal rights. But as World War One approached, Lee
increasingly focused on advocating pacifism, including writing anti war literature,
and this was of course highly criticized, and even among pacifists,
Lee was something of a loner. She distance herself from
(27:00):
people whose pacifism was radical or religiously motivated, and she
was isolated from her home as well. She was in
England when the war began in nineteen fourteen, and she
wasn't able to get back to Italy until after it
was over. During the war, she joined and wrote for
the Union of Democratic Control or the u d C.
(27:21):
The u DC was a British organization that called for
reduced armaments and the creation of an organization among European
nations designed to prevent future warfare, along with a treaty
at the end of the war that did not redraw
all the borders or humiliate the defeated nations. Of course,
the Treaty of Versailles did the opposite, and Lee, having
(27:42):
lived in Germany at several points in her life, was
just certain that the terms of the Treaty of Versailles
that were meant to punish Germany, we're really going to
cause and not prevent, future conflict. Because she knew what
she was talking about. She did. Most of Lee's writing
during and after World War One was about pacifism. In
(28:03):
nineteen fifteen, she wrote an allegory called the ballet of
Nations of present day morality, and in nineteen twenties she
published Satan the Waiter of Philosophic War trilogy. But by
this point both she and her output were slowing down.
She was getting older, and although she was still able
to travel once the war ended, she typically only went
(28:24):
to places that she had been before. In nineteen twenty,
Lee realized that the main villa at il Palmrino had
become much too big for her, and rather than sell
the whole property, she moved into one of the cottages
there that a friend had rented from her and improved.
It was the sort of property that had a main
villa and then several farm cottages that tenant farmers could
(28:44):
live in, and she moved into one of those that
had been fixed up a bit. When Kit answer to
their Thompson died in one Lee became her literary executor.
Mary Robinson was also widowed, remarried, and then widowed again,
but she and Lee never really rekindled their relationship. During
her fifty three years writing, Vernon Lee wrote more than
(29:05):
thirty works of non fiction, four novels, four volumes of
short stories, and a play, as well as essays and letters.
This was a massive output, especially considering that some of
it was very dense and academic and she had no
formal education. She also had ongoing relationships and lengthy correspondences
with people like H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, and Mary Cassatt.
(29:29):
She died in Italy on February five. She'd become chronically ill,
and she had lost most of her hearing. Not long
before her death, she told her own literary executor that
she felt like quote an alien, having no ties either
of nation, blood, class, or profession. The older she got,
the more she felt like she had just sort of
(29:50):
been born in the slightly wrong era. She wished she
had been born a little later, and then she could
have been like a modern woman of letters, rather than
being the sort of odd Victorian outlier. A lot of
her papers are at Colby College in Maine, which is
kind of ironic because she never traveled to the U S.
(30:11):
Having lived through World War One, she was very concerned
about the idea of her work being destroyed in a war,
and her literary executor, Irene Cooper Willis, decided Colby would
be the safest place today. A lot of Lee's work
and aesthetics seems somewhat dated, but a lot of her
other work, especially her histories and her supernatural stories, have
(30:31):
held up a lot better. Those supernatural stories have variously
been reissued, and some have been included in collections into
the twentieth century. You can also find a ton of
this work on the internet for free. The Stories Hauntings
is available I think at Project Guttenberg pretty easily um
(30:52):
and is a fun collection of ghostly short stories to read.
Some of the other work is again very dense, especially
the more philosophical stuff. Do you have some listener mail
for us today? Hi? Sure do? I have two quick
emails that are both about air conditioning and school. What
(31:17):
is from Mary? Mary says greeting Stracy and Holly. I
was listening to your A C podcast while getting ready
for work, and I just had to tell you what's
happening right now. I, like both of you, grew up
in the South. My classrooms had window units and the
halls were oppressive, with the exception of a newer building
with central air. My glasses, which were new to me
my junior year, fogged up when I went from the
(31:38):
classrooms to the halls. I live in central Pennsylvania now
and school just started. While we've had a very wet summer,
we've just hit a bit of a heat wave and
three days in several schools were having early dismissal because
of the heat and the lack of a c in schools.
You couldn't have timed this podcast better. She uh makes
a note about the idea of a episode suggestion, and
(32:01):
then says thanks for all the great stories you share, Mary,
and then on a similar note, we have one that
is from Sally, and Sally says, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
I love your show. I was listening to the episode
on air conditioning and had to write in when I
heard you talking about your schools having or not having
air conditioning. I am from Australia, where the summer days
regularly reached thirty six degrees celsius, and went to high
(32:23):
school from two thousand three. No air conditioning is pretty
standard in Australian schools. Even my expensive private high school
had only one building that was air conditioned. There's an
urban myth popular with Australian school children that if it
gets over forty degrees celsius, everyone gets to go home
from school. To my knowledge, that has never actually happened,
although there are always rumors that it happened once in Melbourne,
(32:46):
so it may just be true. And then the letter
says it's a hot, dry heat, and Melbourne not muggy
and human like it is here. I know I don't
sound like an Australian person when I say the name
of that city. By the way, anyway, I just thought
you might find this thing I'm using best Sally. Thank
you so much Sally and Mary for sending these notes.
I was particularly delighted because we've got a several emails
(33:09):
that were all about air conditioning in school, and because
Mary was talking about how hot it was when this
episode came out. I recorded the air conditioning episode with
ice packs literally held onto my body because it was
so hot. Um because like to record a podcast, you
have to be in a quiet place, which means closing
all the doors and windows and everything. And then the
day that the episode came out, it was just as
(33:31):
hot as as it had been the day that we
recorded it. So that day I think we didn't I
wasn't recording anything that day. I was able to like
hide in an in an air conditioned place from the heat,
so uh. Thanks to everyone who has written to us
about air conditioning in or not in their schools. If
you would like to write to us about this or
(33:52):
any other podcast, where a history podcast at how stuff
works dot com. And then we are all over social
media as miss in History. That's where you'll find our
Facebook and our Twitter, and our Instagram and our Pinterest.
You can come to our website which is missed in
History dot com, or you will find show notes for
the episodes that Holly and I have worked on together
that will include some links to Vernon Lee's various work
(34:13):
in this one. You can also find a searchable archive
of every episode ever and you can do all of
that at Miston history dot com. And you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts and Google podcasts and
wherever else you get your podcasts. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot
(34:34):
com
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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