'The road which leads to the good lies always parallel to the road which leads to the beautiful... Both lead toward a life that is richer, sounder, more favourable for all... If this parallelism dis-appears, it is a sign that either ethics or aesthetics has lost its way.'
For scholars of the Victorian fin de siècle, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) needs little introduction. Yet the fiction, open letters, and essays she published in French, Italian, and German deserve to be better known. Raised fluent in four languages, Lee penned her first pieces in French and Italian. Even when she began to publish more consistently in England and in English, Lee maintained a significant engagement with continental literary fields. Vernon Lee's Cosmopolitan Prose makes key texts of this multilingual oeuvre available to Anglophone readers.
The collection includes Lee's first short story and first piece of literary criticism, two works of juvenilia that contextualise her intellectual development. Her essays on Paul Bourget, George Eliot, and Walter Pater reveal how Lee negotiates the relation of aesthetics to ethics and situates herself within a transnational literary history. The collection also showcases the range and complexity of Lee's twentieth-century political writings, from her anti-imperialist and pacifist open letters to her responses to women's associations and Sibilla Aleramo's iconic feminist novel Una donna (1906).
This volume is the first modern critical edition of these works. In addition to the translations, it includes a comprehensive bibliography of works by Lee published in languages other than English. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the long nineteenth century, particularly those concerned with cosmopolitanism, multilingualism, gender, sexuality, and the fin de siècle.
