VERNON LEE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. PLASTICITY, GENDER, GENRE

Vernon Lee scholars have often studied her writings on the Italian Renaissance in connection with Walter Pater’s. Whilst acknowledging the evident influence of Walter Pater, such a critical perspective risks overlooking Lee’s own contribution to the Victorian creation of the “Renaissance myth” – which, in her case, was to outlive its fin-de-siècle frenzy. Moving from the recent developments in Lee scholarship, this study investigates the presence and the function of the Italian Renaissance in Lee’s writings with specific focus on issues of gender and genre. From this perspective, Lee’s relationship with characters, places, villas, and masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance works as a catalyst for the construction of cultural memory, mediated through hybrid narrative forms. Chapter I explores the phenomenology of the Italian Renaissance as a nineteenth-century myth. In particular, it takes into consideration the works of Jules Michelet and Matthew Arnold, and it highlights the influence that Jacob Burckhardt and John Ruskin had on Victorian culture in spite of their diverging opinions. After grounding Lee’s work in the fin-de-siècle tradition of Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds, chapter II investigates Lee’s two collections of Renaissance essays – Euphorion and Renaissance Fancies and Studies – from an intertextual perspective which unveils the gender specificity of Lee’s writings, but also the construction of gender that these essays deploy at a textual level. Chapter III explores Lee’s fascination with Italian landscapes, which she portrays as spaces of culture. The plasticity of landscape and its meanings – which can be sensed in Lee’s prose, but also in Edith Wharton’s and D. H. Lawrence’s – enables Lee to bounce back and forth in time, moving from contemporary Italy to the imagined landscapes of the Renaissance. This textual strategy is made possible by Lee’s theorization of the “genius loci,” which also provides her with a starting point for endorsing cultural politics steered by democratic sympathies. Finally, chapter IV focuses on Lee’s fluid idea of literary genres. Indeed, the Renaissance is a “trans-genre” topos that Lee repeatedly explores in her essays as well as in her travelogues, supernatural tales, and a number of unpublished writings dating from the first two decades of the twentieth century, long after the end of the fin-de-siècle Renaissance frenzy.