Vernon Lee's Notebooks - 1914-1925

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Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), Vernon Lee's Notebooks - 1914-1925, 1914-1925. Holographical-Lee, Sophie Geoffroy, University of La Réunion; programme EMAN (Thalim, ENS-CNRS-Sorbonne nouvelle). This collection gathers the twenty-five MS notebooks written by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) during her exile in Great Britain during WWI. Dated 1914-1919, they were partially copied in 1925 and bear marginalia. They were discovered by Dr Gilles Pasquet, together with Geneviève Noufflard (1920-2016) and Sophie Geoffroy, in the attic of the Normand property of post-Impressionist painters André Noufflard and Berthe Noufflard (née Langweil), on June 12, 2012. They had been hidden there by a member of the Noufflards's household, Jean Marais, in 1944 when the nazi army occupied this manor house. The inventory of these 25 notebooks and of the hundreds of letters and postcards, the manuscripts, films, photographs and portraits of the Langweil-Noufflard Archive, is currently in progress. This major discovery has led to a complete reevaluation of Vernon Lee's intimacy with her French friends who shared her humanitarian forward-looking views, especially in geopolitical matters. Vernon Lee was an eager and prominent pacifist, and she relied on their ability to protect her writings and her acts of resistance against fascism and nazism in Europe. She was actively engaged in conveying information between Italy, France, Germany and England, published pacifist articles in radical journals and newspapers, belonged to a pressure group dedicated to the construction of a european "concert of nations": the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), a forerunner of the League of Nations. The notebooks contain Vernon Lee's daily accounts of the tragic events she was an eye-witness of or which were reported to her by her friends from all countries, her analyses of international politics, as well as book reviews and critical comments on contemporaneous articles. The notebooks also chronicle, step by step, the genesis of Vernon Lee's future work: The Ballet of the Nations: A Present-Day Morality (London: Chatto & Windus, 1915), Satan the Waster: A Philanthropic War Trilogy (London: John Lane, 1920); and Proteus, or the Future of Intelligence (London: Kegan Paul, 1925), which unfolds her conception of tomorrow's humanity. These notebooks are the "missing link" in the corpus of Lee's "Commonplace Books" and other autobiographical material held at the Vernon Lee Archive, Miller Library, Colby College, Waterville (Maine). Their transcription, initially undertaken by Cécilia Dalleau, is being revised and indexed by Dr. Sally Blackburn-Daniels, who was the scientific advisor for the scenic performance of The Ballet of the Nations, a landmark event at the Villa Il Palmerino in June 2019. 2025/08/09 on the EMAN platform : https://eman-archives.org/HoL/collections/show/8