Hauntings: Fantastic Stories

by Vernon Lee

Overview

Violet Paget spoke four languages, began her career as a journalist at the age of 13, suffered from maladies that were probably psychosomatic, and may have secretly been a lesbian. She was, in other words, the perfect Victorian lady writer of gothic horror, a mystery and a scandal in her own right. Though not well remembered today, Paget's work-often likened to the works of Henry James (whom she admired, and even dedicated a novel to)-is worth seeking out for lovers of the genre. Her ghost stories are, by turns, hauntingly ambiguous tales about love conflated with mental illness, femme fatales, confused sexuality, and women sacrificed on the altar of marriage. This 1890 collection, considered by some her finest, includes the tales: • "Amour: Dure: Passages from the Diary of Spiridion Trepka" • "Oke of Okehurst" • "A Wicked Voice" "Vernon Lee" was the pseudonym of British writer VIOLET PAGET (1865-1935), who wrote numerous novels, essays, travelogues, and works of literary criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605206592
Publisher:	Cosimo Classics
Publication date:	07/01/2009
Pages:	148
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the British writer Violet Paget (1856 - 1935). She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music and travel. The English writer and translator Montague Summers described Vernon Lee as "the greatest [...] of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction." E. F. Bleiler has claimed that "Lee's stories are really in a category by themselves. Intelligent, amusingly ironic, imaginative, original, they deserve more than the passing attention that they have attracted". Neil Barron described the contents of Lee's collection Hauntings thus "The stories are powerful and very striking, among the finest of their kind."