Vernon Lee, pseudonym of Violet Paget Biography

British writer, born in France to English Parents. She lived mainly in Italy, whose history and culture were the subject of most of her works. Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880) and its numerous sequels were praised for their scholarship. A prolific and versatile writer, her other works include Genius Loci (1899) and The Tower of Mirrors (1914), both travel works; The Handling of Words (1923); and Music and Its Lovers (1932). She is best remembered for her fiction, which includes the novel Miss Brown (1884), satirizing London literary and artistic circles. Her supernatural stories published in her three main collections, Hauntings (1890), Pope Jacynth (1904), and For Maurice (1927), are elegiac tales mainly rooted in Italy, where the past exercises a haunting dominance over the drab and shallow present, and a sense of loss resounds throughout. A biography by P. Gunn was published in 1964.