Patricia Pulham

This, the first collection of essays on the aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee, offers a wide range of critical writings by scholars. Key works are examined including Euphorion, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories and Music and Its Lovers . New light is shed on Lee's relationships with contemporaries such as Lee-Hamilton, Pater and Wilde.

This book argues that, in Victorian literature, desires which cannot be openly acknowledged are often buried and encrypted in the marble bodies of statues. Examining sculpture's ubiquity in Victorian galleries and museums Pulham observes that, while touch is prohibited in these cultural locations, Victorian texts offer 'safe' spaces where statues may be kissed or caressed using metaphors of tactility that work at the intersections of touch and vision to permit the recovery of forbidden love.

Explores Victorian writers' erotic investment in statuesTheorises the function of the sculptural body in Victorian poetry and proseOffers thorough readings of sculpture in Victorian texts and contextsExamines a wide range of works by well-known and lesser-known writers of the period (e.g. Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Olive Custance, Arthur O'Shaughnessy)Extends the British focus to encompass nineteenth-century European and American writings This book argues that, in Victorian literature, transgressive desires that cannot be openly acknowledged are often buried and encrypted in the marble bodies of statues. Examining sculpture's ubiquity in Victorian galleries and museums, Pulham observes that while touch is prohibited in these cultural locations Victorian texts offer 'safe' spaces where sculptures may be kissed or caressed using metaphors of tactility that work at the intersections of touch and vision and permit the recovery of forbidden love.

In her persuasively argued study, Patricia Pulham astutely combines psychoanalytic theory with socio-historical criticism to examine a selection of fantastic tales by the female aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). Lee's own definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is not found in the Society of Psychical Research but in our own psyches, where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D.W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Pulham argues that the prevalence of the past in Lee's tales signifies not only an historical but a psychic past. Thus the 'ghosts' that haunt Lee's supernatural fiction, as well as her aesthetic, psychological, and historical writings, held complex meanings for her that were fundamental to her intellectual development and allowed her to explore alternative identities that permit the expression of transgressive sexualities.

In her persuasively argued study, Patricia Pulham astutely combines psychoanalytic theory with socio-historical criticism to examine a selection of fantastic tales by the female aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). Lee's own definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is not found in the Society of Psychical Research but in our own psyches, where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D.W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Pulham argues that the prevalence of the past in Lee's tales signifies not only an historical but a psychic past. Thus the 'ghosts' that haunt Lee's supernatural fiction, as well as her aesthetic, psychological, and historical writings, held complex meanings for her that were fundamental to her intellectual development and allowed her to explore alternative identities that permit the expression of transgressive sexualities.