A Tiger-Cat, As Uncanny As She Is Intelligent
Barbara Burns speaks to Colton Valentine, whose book Vernon Lee’s Cosmopolitan Prose: A Translated Selection is published this summer in the MHRA Jewelled Tortoise series.
BB. Vernon Lee (the pen name of Violet Paget, 1856–1935) was a prolific writer who travelled across Europe and published in English, Italian, French and German. What can you tell us about her popularity as an author and her intellectual legacy as an unconventional and subversive writer and critic who was ahead of her time?
CV. Vernon Lee is not a household name today, but she very much was during the late Victorian period. Her first publications were in the 1870s, when she was still a teenager. But she really burst onto the scene with her debut volume, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), for which she was hailed as the next luminary in a long tradition of British art writing. At quite a young age, Lee was suddenly being cited alongside the likes of John Ruskin, John Addington Symonds, and Walter Pater and found herself welcomed into the most important Victorian intellectual circles. She could have made quite a successful career of continuing to work in this aestheticist mode, one which combined extraordinary erudition with luscious prose to analyse the beautiful.
But one of the things I find fascinating about Lee is that she could never sit intellectually still. No sooner had she been anointed as the heiress of aestheticism than Lee wrote a novel, Miss Brown (1884), satirizing that exact movement for its moral complacency and sexual politics. Miss Brown lost her a lot of friends and supporters, and that cycle would sort of repeat for the next five decades. Lee became passionate and knowledgeable about so many domains, from psychological aesthetics to pragmatism and political economy. She published dozens of books, in a vast range of genres. But she was constantly revising her own positions and was resistant to groupthink. Plus, she couldn’t resist picking a fight.
The result was that over time she came to be both very respected and rather maligned. Henry James once called her a ‘tiger-cat’, declaring her ‘as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent – which is saying a great deal’. It didn’t help that, as you say, many of Lee’s positions were ahead of her time. This left her out of step with the Victorians, and by the time modernism was in full swing, writers tended to be focused on burying their predecessors. So Virginia Woolf dismissed Lee as a ‘garrulous baby’, and T. S. Eliot derided the fin-de-siècle ‘soapy sea / Of Symonds – Walter Pater – Vernon Lee’. It took a long time for Lee’s reputation to recover, but there’s been a burst of scholarly interest in her in recent decades. This volume is a product of that interest. But it’s also an attempt to make more of Lee’s work accessible to non-specialists.
BB. Your volume focuses on providing English translations of a selection of Lee’s non-anglophone texts which have been long neglected. What insights do these writings provide into her world view, her European networks, and her role as a transnational mediator?
CV. One of the things I didn’t mention in that short history of Lee’s career is that she was raised quad-lingual, speaking English, French, Italian, and German. She was born to British parents in France and grew up peripatetically across Europe, before eventually settling outside of Florence. Now most Victorian writers were multilingual to some degree; they could usually read French novels and often carry on a conversation in one other modern European language. But Lee’s upbringing put her on an entirely different level.
She was uncertain as a teenager which language she wanted to pursue for publications, and so she experimented. Her first short story was published in French, her first pieces of criticism in Italian; and she kept up this practice throughout her life, often switching languages or self-translating when there was an especially good opportunity in one country. Lee specialists have always known about some of this material, but it’s pretty rare for anyone to read or write on it. That’s in part because most of literary studies is institutionally nationalist. Because Lee was ‘English’, she’s generally studied in English departments, and the non-English material gets left out of the picture. When I was writing my PhD dissertation – in an English department! – I kept coming across more of these pieces and decided a selected translation could help put Lee’s multilingualism back on the map.
As for how these pieces transform our vision of Lee, they show us a writer engaged in so many different national and disciplinary conversations. Take the Italian case. You have Lee writing about British and French writers for this audience, something you’d expect a multilingual to do since they’re well-positioned to be a literal and figurative translator. But she’s also weighing in on new developments in psychology (quite a young discipline), on how critics of Italian imperialism might learn from English dissidents, on the so-called ‘woman question’, and even giving her two cents on how to respond to the Messina Earthquake that devastated southern Italy in 1908.
BB. Does this material change the way we should think about Lee’s popularity and impact during her lifetime?
CV. I gave you a capsule history of Lee’s rise and fall in England, but that undersells her broader influence. Along with its translations, Vernon Lee’s Cosmopolitan Prose contains an extensive multilingual bibliography, which includes both pieces Lee wrote in non-English languages as well as all translations of her work up to World War Two. When putting together that material, I realized that she was much more widely translated than I, or I think anyone else, had imagined. Beyond the usual suspects – French, Italian, German, and Spanish – there were translations into Swedish, Dano-Norwegian, Czech, Modern Greek, and even Catalan. I’m sure there are others I’ve missed. The other author I work most on is James and while he’s much more famous today than Lee, in his lifetime he never had anything near this sort of international reception.
BB. Taking on Lee’s multilingual output in the role of translator is no mean challenge. What is your own linguistic background, and how did you find the experience of creating English versions of the texts in your collection?
CV. One of my decisions early on when working with the material was that I wasn’t going to try to modernize it. In fact, I was going to do the opposite: to try to write like Vernon Lee. In the book’s introduction, I talk about how there’s a famous translation theorist Friedrich Schleiermacher who said that one shouldn’t translate with the goal of writing what someone would have said in another language, because there aren’t enough multilingual authors to really understand what that would mean. I suppose that makes sense in the aggregate, but with Lee it clearly doesn’t. We have a very large English corpus; we know what her English sounded like. We even have examples of her self-translating between French, Italian, and English. We can definitely try to translate the texts as Lee herself would have, and that was my goal.
When I was hesitating on a cognate or worried that something might be too slangy or archaic, I would consult Lee’s English books and see what words she used. That might sound a little pedantic, but it was actually one of the most interesting parts of the work, because I learned so much about Lee’s style by comparing her prose in different languages. One of my epiphanies was that Lee’s English is itself very much inflected by romance language syntax, something I discuss in the introduction as ‘multilingual drift’, the languages seeping into each other.
As to my own linguistic background, I always say I have ‘schoolboy multilingualism’ in the sense that I alas only grew up speaking English. Once I became interested in literature, I realized what a loss this was, and I’ve spent a lot of my time in higher education learning languages. After my BA, I spent two years in Paris doing a French Master’s degree, and I’ve done a lot of coursework in Italian, German, and Swedish. I was lucky to have a great Spanish program at my high school, and I have some Latin too, though far below the standards of an educated Victorian! I’ll never quite be at the same level as Lee or anyone raised multilingual, but I do think I’ve reached the point where, in addition to having the technical expertise necessary for translation, I can understand what it would have been like for someone like her to write and live across languages.
BB. Lee was a pioneering figure in feminist thinking. In what ways did she challenge traditional gender roles and champion female self-determination through her writing?
CV. Lee was certainly a trailblazer, but she had a complicated relationship to what we would now call first-wave feminism. One of the exciting things about this collection is that it includes two of her most direct confrontations with gender, both written in Italian in 1902 and 1907 respectively. The first, ‘Women as Citizens’, is addressed to L’Unione femminile, an Italian feminist organization. The other responds to the Italian writer Sibilla Aleramo’s novel Una Donna (A Woman, 1906), itself a bit of a forgotten masterpiece whose autobiographical tale of domestic abuse made a huge splash and was widely translated.
As I said earlier, Lee was wary of groupthink, and both pieces sketch out positions askew of mainstream feminism. The first argues that while the rights to hold office and vote are valuable, they are ultimately less important than the education that would allow women to be effective democratic citizens, to shape public opinion for the good. The second piece expresses real sympathy for Aleramo but also criticizes the novel for not making its political case as clearly as it could.
In some ways, it may seem bizarre, even discomforting, for Lee to be quibbling and downplaying suffrage, which was the real focus of feminism at this time. In a 1907 letter to the Westminster Gazette, ‘Why I Want Women to Have a Vote’, Lee was more affirmative but also disparaged the Suffragettes’ tactics. But you can also see her as pre-empting one of the major insights of second-wave feminism: that equality needed to be substantive, not formal. What was the point, Lee argued, of being able to vote, if education were being withheld from you, if you were stuck in a disempowering marriage? Indeed, the discussion of abuse and pre-marital rape in the Aleramo review puts Lee squarely in the second-wave zone. Suffice to say there were not many Victorians tackling these issues. Obviously, Lee didn’t have the vocabulary of Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem, but she’s pointing the way to these questions.
BB. How was Lee’s dedication to pacifism and her critique of European nationalism and militarism during the First World War received by her contemporaries?
CV. Not well! To put it mildly. I mentioned earlier this habit Lee had of angering her friends and acquaintances, and World War One was sort of the last straw. In part due to her German-Swiss governess Marie Schüpbach, Lee had always had a strong sentimental attachment to Germany, and she had close relationships with several German citizens. Her work in psychological aesthetics, where Germany was at the vanguard, also meant Lee was closely enmeshed in these intellectual circles. When the war started, all this collaboration started to look like, well, collaboration in a very different sense. But because she loved the people, books, and places of so many nations, Lee was just never going to be able to commit to the patriotic war machine. Stranded in England, away from her Florence home, she kept up a furious correspondence across enemy lines and kept publishing in the few anti-war venues that would accept her. The culmination of this period was her pacifist closet drama Satan the Waster (1920), which was boycotted upon its publication and still exasperates most critics. But it’s one of my favourite works by Lee.
I talk more about Satan and these questions in the book that grew out of my PhD dissertation, which is under contract with Princeton University Press and should come out next year. So I won’t say more for the moment, except to highlight what’s notable about the pieces in Vernon Lee’s Cosmopolitan Prose. The volume includes several of the pacifist open letters Lee wrote for Italian and French venues in the lead-up to WWI. They show you again how in touch she was with different national conversations: she was trying to establish connections and make people see things from other perspectives. Also, while putting together the multilingual bibliography, I learned that the germ of Satan the Waster – The Ballet of the Nations (1915) – was translated into German the same year it appeared in English, and into French two years later. That was a real revelation for me, since it showed how influential Lee continued to be internationally even when she was being shunned by her compatriots.
BB. How did you get interested in the work of Vernon Lee?
CV. Through Henry James! It’s funny because James said some very snippy things about Lee, but he was an early mentor figure for her. She dedicated that novel Miss Brown to him ‘for good luck’. Temperamentally they were so different, but they had a lot in common as well – both cosmopolitans adrift of their families and nations, both queer. The more I learned about Lee, the more fascinated I became, and I soon realized there was a lot of work that needed to be done on her multilingualism. James was sort of responsible here too. My first ‘discovery’ was that a short story Lee had published poking fun at him, ‘Lady Tal’, wasn’t published in 1892 as most people thought, but actually three years earlier under a different title and bilingually: as ‘Two Novels’ and ‘Deux Romans’. Scholars hadn’t known about it because it appeared in an obscure French journal that for part of its short tenure had an English branch. There wasn’t a translator noted in either version, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what language Lee had written the piece in originally; English, it turned out. I got a real kick out of the bibliographic hunt, and things kind of snowballed from there.
BB. Were there any surprises for you while putting together the volume?
CV. One realization I had while working on this project is that Lee doesn’t seem to have ever composed any original piece in German. There are a number of things published by her exclusively in German with no translator attribution, and we’ve always assumed that because she wrote letters in German and translated from it, Lee was also writing in the language. My original table of contents included one of these German pieces with no translator named. But then I came across an English manuscript of that article and got suspicious, and eventually I found a letter from Lee making it clear that she’d just had the piece silently translated from English to German. I ruled out several other cases in a similar way. It’s incredibly difficult to be certain when working with multilingual writers of what language they first wrote anything in, and someone else might well come across a German manuscript by Lee in the future. But for now, my hypothesis is that all the German material was silently translated, published in German, yes, but not written in it.
That’s why Vernon Lee’s Cosmopolitan Prose only ended up including material translated from French and Italian. This might seem more like a disappointment than a ‘surprise’, but in a way it just reaffirmed to me how enmeshed Lee was in continental European circles. She was publishing all this material in other languages that was never accessible to the anglophone public, and even when she composed in English, people assumed her translations were originals. That’s serious cosmopolitanism!
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