Vernon Lee's Problem with Landor

Abstract

This article considers some fundamental elements of Vernon Lee’s critical theory by focussing attention on her criticisms of Walter Savage Landor, whose ‘classical’ or ‘rhetorical’ style she attributes to the writer’s lack of ‘feeling’. Her arguments show the subtle ways in which aesthetics and ethics were connected in her thought, and give a relatively distinct view of her literary values. Amid growing debate about the ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’, about ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’, in art and criticism, Lee was influenced particularly by Walter Pater. The present essay attempts to clarify her intellectual relationship to her contemporaries and to nascent ‘modernist’ values.