Vernon Lee published more than twenty short stories and novellas during her career. Her first short story to appear in print, ‘Les aventures d'une pièce de monnaie’ (1869), was published serially in the French journal La famille when she was thirteen and her last collection of ‘fantastic’ tales, which she wrote for her friend Maurice Baring, came out in 1927. It is evident that Lee was consistently attracted to the short story form from the fact that she returned to the genre over and again whilst continuing to produce various works of cultural history, aesthetics and psychology. As we saw in the previous chapter with the example of ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lad/, in many ways, Lee used her short fiction to offer a more personalized and less guarded imaginative articulation of ideas that she was simultaneously developing in her non-fiction writing. In her meditation on the craft of writing, The Handling of Words, Lee praised the short story form for the concentrated expression of an idea that it allowed and, in this, compared it to ‘a poem or little pla’ (HW, 19). And clearly, as can be seen in her stories’ powerful evocation of the ‘genius loci’ of the places that she had visited and in her imaginary portraits which palpably bring to life historical characters, Lee's short fiction fully exploits the genre's capacity for intensity and economy of effect.

The continental settings of much of Lee's short fiction also suggest a significant link between her expatriate identity and her use of the short story form. Here, Hilary Fraser's recent account of Lee's national identity as one that was simultaneously dislocated and productively cosmopolitan can be helpfully extended to explore the ways in which Lee's interstitial national identity came to shape her short fiction.