Over the course of her sixty-year career, Vernon Lee, woman of letters, aesthetician and pacifist, both anticipated, and participated in, the wider shift from Victorian earnestness to Modernist play which shaped British literature at the turn of the twentieth century. English by birth but raised in Europe, Lee was in the unusual position for a Victorian woman of being trained from an early age (as she would later recall) somewhat haphazardly by her mother and her half-brother (the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton) for a career as a professional writer (see HW, 297- 301 and Colby, 6,12). Critical acclaim came at the early age of twenty-four with the publication of her first book, Studies of the Eighteenth-Century in Italy (1880), a collection of essays on eighteenth-century opera and comedy from her adopted homeland, which was received as an astoundingly erudite book to have been written by a young woman without any formal education. What followed was a long, prestigious and sometimes controversial career which saw Lee become an uncontested authority on Italian culture, participate, in her fiction and non-fiction writing, in the dominant cultural debates of the day and attempt to sway public opinion internationally on topics such as the First World War and vivisection. It is a testament both to the vitality and continued appeal of Lee's writing that her novels, novellas, supernatural tales, pacifist plays and essays on cultural history and aesthetics have attracted a new generation of readers whose various interests in the Victorian ghost story, the culture of the Victorian fin de siècle, precursors to the Modernist movement, literary depictions of non-normative sexualities and European identity have brought them in contact with this pioneering and inventive author.

At the age of nineteen, Violet Paget took the masculine nom de plume ‘Vernon Lee’ because, in her own words, she was ‘sure that no one reads a woman's writing on art, history or aesthetics with anything but unmitigated contempt’ (quoted in Gunn, 66). Where the early careers of the Bronte sisters and novelists George Eliot and George Sand have shown that this strategy was hardly unique, the fact that, despite her gender soon being found out, Lee continued to use her masculine pen-name in public and private, is telling.