Vernon Lee: Art Lover

Abstract

Abstract: Victorian art critic and historian Vernon Lee is best known for her theory of empathy, which attributes art viewers' consciously held aesthetic preferences to unconsciously felt physiological responses to visual stimuli. Scholars have been especially interested in the ways empathy anticipates modernist and New Critical emphases on objectivity and empiricism, often treating empathy as the culmination of Lee's career. This article turns to lesser-known texts by Lee to show that she went on to have serious misgivings not only about her own physiological theory of aesthetics but about other critics' pursuits of objectivity and empiricism as well.