SOURCE: "Vernon Lee," in Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, Volume I, edited by E. F. Bleiler, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985, pp. 329-35.

In the following essay, Clute offers a thematic overview of Lee's supernatural tales.

Under the cover of "Vernon Lee"—the pseudonym of an expatriate—Violet Paget is a forgotten woman, a figure of the nineteenth century who lived much of her life in the twentieth, weaving for herself, over her later years, a legend of impenetrable eccentricity. Traces of that deaf, spinsterish, rude, interminable monologist survive in literary chronicles, and undoubtedly in some living memories. Far less easy to encounter is the young Miss Paget, born in France, childhood friend of the painter John Singer Sargent, precocious author (already as Lee) of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), formidable advocate of Walter Pater's austere aestheticism, uneasy associate of Henry James (whom she eventually alienated), and...