‘Warming Me Like a Cordial’: The Ethos of the Body in Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics

Abstract

Wyndham Lewis once made the startling observation that, ‘To read [Vernon Lee’s] pages is like watching a person of some intelligence administering electric shocks to herself (Lewis 1927, 111). Some decades earlier, Virginia Woolf had given herself a warning in her diary that she must not ‘let the pen write without guidance; for fear of becoming slack and untidy like Vernon Lee. Her ligaments are too loose for my taste’ (Woolf 1977, 266). These comments invoke the body in contradistinction: one in terms of tension, the other of slackness. Woolf’s reference to ‘ligaments’ is especially telling, suggesting as it does a physical body inadequately disciplined or regulated. This critical anxiety triggered by the somatic in Vernon Lee’s writings is notable in the response of both her contemporary readers and her later critics, who have described her work in phrases including the following: ‘unnatural, almost pathological, tension’ (Gunn 1964, 95), ‘unwholesome weirdness’, ‘perverse and brutal’, ‘unhealthy excess’ (Gardner 1987, 21), and ‘riotous verbiage’ (Harriet Waters Preston quoted in Gardner 1987, 41),¹ — not to leave out Henry James, who, disturbed by what he called her ‘ferocity’, described her work as ‘savage’ and ‘violent’ (James 1980, III. 84–7). All of these comments similarly point to uncontainable or illegitimate sensations revealed in her prose, inappropriate extremes which tend to burst through her language, occasionally running counter to her seeming design, and producing a marked discomfort in her readers.