ABSTRACT
Sondeep Kandola focuses on how Clementina Caroline Anstruther-Thomson’s theory of psychological aesthetics (and Vernon Lee’s responses) reads uncannily like a patchwork Modernist manifesto. In the later stages of the argument, an unlikely, yet convincing, successor to Lee’s and Thomson’s work emerges in the figure of D. H. Lawrence. In White Peacock(1911) and Women in Love(1920), Lawrence offers a ‘counter-Decadence animus’ in which male homosociality has a restorative effect. Lawrence as a male writer, Kandola avows, owes a significant, though unwitting, conceptual debt to Lee and Anstruther-Thomson’s inimitable, if forgotten, brand of Sapphic Modernism.
