On Vernon Lee's Walter Pater and Translating the Victorians

Abstract

Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) (1856–1935) first met Walter Pater (1839–1894) at Oxford during the summer of 1881, though she was already well acquainted with his work. The extent and import of their relationship, which lasted until Pater's death, has received significant attention by biographers and critics.1 Like many of Lee's friendships, its intimacies were both personal and intellectual—risking, as she put it, “a question of caw-me-caw-you” through reciprocal endorsement.2 The epistolary-averse Pater was uncharacteristically forthcoming in their correspondence, and Lee often stayed with his family when visiting England. The two read aloud from drafts, exchanged books, and met repeatedly on the published page. Indeed, scholars have traced an elegant intertextual arc from Lee's rewriting of Pater's “The Child in the House” (1878) in Belcaro (1881), to her dedication of Euphorion (1884), through her introduction to Juvenilia (1887), and arriving at her “Valedictory” conclusion to Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895).3 By this account, Lee initially adheres to Paterian aesthetics, then grows skeptical of the doctrine's epicurean features, but finds solace when her mentor's late work takes its own ethical turn.