Miss Brown

by Vernon Lee

Towards the end of the sitting, he suddenly looked up. "Have you ever read the 'Vita Nuova,' Miss Brown?" he asked. "What's the 'Vita Nuova'?" "It is a little book by Dante, in prose and verse, telling how he met Beatrice, and then how she died. It is much more beautiful than the 'Divina Commedia.'" She looked incredulous. "Is it more beautiful than Bertran del Bornio, where he carried his head like a lantern? Or Bocca degli Abati, where they all change into snakes? Or Cacciaguida when he prophesies about Dante's exile?" -- "It is quite different -- all about beautiful things, and love." -- "I don't care for that." -- "You must read it some day, though." Miss Brown was silent, and relapsed into her usual sullen appearance.

Genres: Victorian, Classics, Fiction

452 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1884

About the author

Violet Paget, known by her pen name Vernon Lee, 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, poetry and contributed to The Yellow Book. An engaged feminist, she always dressed à la garçonne, and was a member of the Union of democratic control.

Her literary works explored the themes of haunting and possession. The English writer and translator, Montague Summers described Vernon Lee as "the greatest [...] of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction."

She was responsible for introducing the concept of empathy (Einfühling) into the English language. Empathy was a key concept in Lee's psychological aesthetics which she developed on the basis of prior work by Theodor Lipps. Her response to aesthetics interpreted art as a mental and corporeal experience. This was a significant contribution to the philosophy of art which has been largely neglected.

"The Lie of the Land", in the voume "Limbo, and other Essays", has been one of the most influential essays on landscaping.

Additionally she wrote, along with her friend and colleague Henry James, critically about the relationship between the writer and his/her audience pioneering the concept of criticism and expanding the idea of critical assessment among all the arts as relating to an audience's (or her personal) response. She was a strong, though vexed, proponent of the Aesthetic movement, and after a lengthy written correspondence met the movement's effective leader, Walter Pater, in England in 1881, just after encountering his famous disciple Oscar Wilde. Her interpretation of the movement called for social action, setting her apart from both Wilde and Pater.

Reviews

[Jenny Cooke (Bookish Shenanigans) · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're strongly feminist then this book will frustrate you a lot. It's a novel that had potential and on the surface is a critique of the aesthetic movement, but fails to create characters that you can really engage with or care about. If you're studying Victorian literature and want to read more texts about the Aesthetic and Decadent movement then this would be a good text to look at but otherwise, I would say that most Victorian literature is worth reading over this.

[Gwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not Vernon Lee's best, but not Vernon Lee's worst. Intensely character driven and somewhat autobiographical.

Read this one as part of my studies. Very useful if you're a literature student reading for some context and critique on the Aesthetes and the Decadents or just Victorian literature in general.

Miss Brown can be pretty frustrating when you reach the end if you were disappointed with Anne's decision like I was. I felt like there was a lot of build up for a less than satisfactory ending, but I still gleaned a lot from it. Much of the plot is largely character driven and revolves around Anne Brown and whether she will decide to marry Walter Hamlin. While characters like Hamlin, Chough and the Leighs do get some occasional spotlight, the story's focus is really on Anne and her personal, spiritual and intellectual journey.

Given the author's gradually souring attitude towards those involved in the Aesthetic and Decadent movement, it becomes evident that by volume two she had found many of her fellow aesthetes to be fickle and repulsive creatures. Volume one has a very different tone to volumes two and three and part of this is reflected in the change in POV from Hamlin to Anne. Vernon Lee didn't bother to hide her criticism of the aesthetes of her time, either. Close reading reveals that the characters names allude to real-life nineteenth-century critics (Walter Hamlin Pater, Anne Ford Madox Brown, Cosmo Chough Monkhouse). No surprise then that Miss Brown garnered such a shocked reception in 1884.

Overall, not bad - but if not for my literary studies, I probably wouldn't have picked up. Glad I did though. Vernon Lee, much as I love all her stuff, is better suited to her short stories I think. There needs to be some nicer editions too. I'd love to have a nicely bound physical copy on my shelf!

[Emily Ursuliak · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this on the suggestion of someone in my thesis defence committee because it's related to what my novel deals with. It took me forever to get through. It was worthwhile for me to read, but wasn't really my thing.

[Christopher Robinson]

Sucks!