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“... kiss from the intelligent, abrasive and mannishly attired châtelaine of Il Palmerino in Fiesole. Vernon Lee, as Violet Paget was widely known, was then in her early forties. She had recently lost both her mother, from whom she had received scant affection, and the company of her most faithful woman friend, a tweedy, kind-hearted dog-lover called Kit ...”

“... stories carried warnings, admonitions or silent appeals for justice. Violet Paget, who wrote as Vernon Lee, learned from this body of writing, and from Gaskell especially. But the moral drive of High Victorian literature was alien to her, and she confounded the expectations that had formed around supernatural fiction written by women. Spiritual ...”

“... human sinfulness: ‘greedy loves and greedy hates’. Hamlet walks in the Supernatural Tales of Vernon Lee, alias Violet Paget, a friend of James, and of friends of his including Edith Wharton. Her supernatural vein would appear to be an embellishment and burlesque of the 18th-century Italy imagined by this pioneer art historian (and pacifist). One of ...”

“... Convention’, we find John Singer Sargent’s 1881 portrait of an austerely boyish Vernon Lee, and Alvaro Guevara’s Dame Edith Sitwell from 1916. Laura Knight, three years earlier, had been condemned by the Telegraph for a self-portrait with a nude model that lacked ‘the higher charm of the “eternal feminine”’. A few such notable ...”

“... with someone or something, as in sympathy, the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ or, in the coinage of Vernon Lee which Luckhurst discusses, empathy. Myers saw love as the basis of all telepathy, and his own life-story, complicated by disavowed bisexuality, melancholia and even unacknowledged fraudulence (including plagiarism), constantly raises the matter of ...”

“... The best-known object of her affections seems to have been the novelist and aesthetician Vernon Lee, to whom she obliquely declared herself in two love poems included in a letter of 1886. ‘You are something of an electric battery to me … & I am getting faint fr. want of contact!’ she wrote a few months later; but ...”

“... It was here, amid the Anglo-Florentine colony – the Berensons, the Actons, Janet Ross, Vernon Lee, with their house-guests such as Edith Wharton and Percy Lubbock – that Iris spent her girlhood. It was a society with a raging appetite for gossip, and before long Sybil had become almost their favourite subject: her dazzling wardrobe, her ...”

“... Spencer ‘speaks like a man whose every sentence is connected with a general principle’; Vernon Lee ‘is like a museum, rather untidily arranged’; Yeats has ‘a smile like an atmosphere’. Dever argues with some ingenuity that we should regard Works and Days as a novel, but she also concedes, with good humour, that this approach quite ...”

“... will in its due time lead us into another world’. Wright’s heroine in much of the narrative is Vernon Lee (whose real name was Violet Paget), an expatriate Briton who was, as one obituarist declared, ‘cosmopolitan from her birth, without any single national tie or sympathy’. She denounced the nationalistic divisions between Germany and the ...”

“... of Sapphism lay all about her. Sellers was a close friend and even lived for a while with Vernon Lee, a well-known writer and 1890s’ aesthete whose love of women was no secret. And Harrison’s final years were spent in Paris with Mirrlees, whose first novel dramatises Sapphist circles, though it is set in the 17th century to disguise any ...”

“... image, 20th-century viewers were inclined to remark on its air of tension and unease – what Vernon Lee aptly termed the ‘crispation de nerfs’ in the painter’s work. In 1985, one art historian, David Lubin, turned the picture into an occasion for some psychosexual fantasising. Lubin also tried to answer the riddle Sargent had posed by ...”

“... indeed, the sketch which works is often more striking than anything finished – the portrait of Vernon Lee which Sargent threw off in a couple of hours is admired more than many of his full-dress numbers. Anything which interrupts the pure business of transcription, any attempt to do it from memory, will take away some of the freshness. It’s not ...”

“... that the unconscious is omitted from the representation. He rather curiously selects Lombroso and Vernon Lee as typically symptomatic readers, and The Interpretation of Dreams, so decisive for all later interpretations of interpretation, came a bit late for his purposes. Arthur Symons observed in 1898 that ‘it is not natural to be what is called ...”

“... into Carter’s ‘private opera house of the individual sensibility’. In an essay from 1911, Vernon Lee described the knack of seeing past the individual production: imprisoned in her seat, the spectator could allow her mind to ‘divagate from the music only to the stage; not the literal stage of indifferently painted lath and pasteboard, with its ...”

“... among them) and some with less. Bernard Berenson, Janet Ross (Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen) and Vernon Lee were their near neighbours and friends. In Florence there were English banks and English doctors, English shops where you could buy tea and mackintoshes. This art-loving, literary Anglo-American community in Italy had complex relationships with ...”