12 Facts About Vernon Lee

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the French-born British writer Violet Paget.

Vernon Lee is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics.

Vernon Lee's library was left to the British Institute of Florence and can still be inspected by visitors.

Scholars speculate that Vernon Lee was a lesbian and had long-term intense relationships with three women, Mary Robinson, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, and British author Amy Levy.

Vernon Lee played the harpsichord and her appreciation of music animates her first major work, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy.

Vernon Lee was so nervous that it wouldn't live up to her expectations that she escaped to the garden and listened rapturously through an open window as her mother worked out the music on the piano.

Vernon Lee dedicated her short ghost story "A Wicked Voice" to composer Mary Augusta Wakefield in 1887.

Vernon Lee was instrumental in the introduction of the German concept of Einfuhlung, or 'empathy' into the study of aesthetics in the English-speaking world.

Vernon Lee developed her own theory of psychological aesthetics in collaboration with her lover, Kit Anstruther-Thomson, based on previous works by William James, Theodor Lipps, and Karl Groos.

Vernon Lee claimed that spectators "empathise" with works of art when they call up memories and associations and cause often unconscious bodily changes in posture and breathing.

Vernon Lee was known for her numerous essays about travel in Italy, France, Germany, and Switzerland, which attempted to capture the psychological effects of places rather than to convey any particular piece of information.

Vernon Lee was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement and after a lengthy written correspondence, met the movement's effective leader, Walter Pater, in England in 1881, just after encountering one of Pater's most famous disciples, Oscar Wilde.