Vernon Lee (Violet Paget): Biographical Data
"Vernon Lee" is cosmopolitan writer Violet Paget's chosen pseudonym. She was born on 14 October 1856 at Château St Léonard (Boulogne-sur-Mer, France) and died on 13 February 1935 in Florence (Italy).
Born in France to a part French, Polish, West Indian, Welsh and Scottish family, educated in Switzerland and Germany, Vernon Lee travelled across England, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Gibraltar and Morocco, and made her home in Florence. A great conversationalist, a precocious writer, a "sentimental traveller", a prolific letter-writer and a tireless network builder, Vernon Lee produced an important oeuvre across disciplines.
Her erudite genetic and evolutionist approach to literature, art history, musicology developed from aesthetics into a ground-breaking theory of empathy (Einfühlung) and inner mimicry that foreshadowed mirror-neurones. In the early 1900s her definition of sexual identity as social construction paved the way for gender studies. An active pacifist as early as 1910, she worked at what was to become the European project during WWI and in the inter-war-period as a member of the UDC (future SDN then ONU).
Hailed by Robert Browning as early as 1880 for her scholarly Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), acknowledged for her intelligence and high culture by Henry James, Vernon Lee was a close friend of painter John Singer Sargent, and art critic Walter Pater, to name but a few of them. Her renowned Salon at her Villa Il Palmerino in Florence was a European hotbed for political, artistic and scientific discussion.
Her bibliography reflects the scope and the originality of her thinking and her works.
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Sophie Geoffroy, "Vernon Lee (Violet Paget): Biographical Data"Site "Holographical-Lee (HoL)Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) : Letters, notebooks and manuscripts - Lettres, carnets et manuscrits"
Consulté le 25/11/2024 sur la plateforme EMAN
https://eman-archives.org/HoL/biographie-vernon-lee