ABSTRACT
Vernon Lee had a lifelong interest in history, especially the history of Italy, the country where the majority of her ghost stories are set and where she spent much of her adult life. Vernon Lee, born Violet Paget, was a prolific novelist, travel writer, essayist, and short story writer whose work covers a wide range of topics from Italian history to gender politics. In the decades following her death her work fell into obscurity, but in the last few years there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in her writing. Lee’s ambiguous take on the ghost story makes her fiction a neat fit for Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the Fantastic, which states that hauntings in supernatural narratives are often undecidably poised between a natural and supernatural explanation. Vernon Lee’s ghost stories privilege subjective sensory experience and individual impression over omniscient narrative judgement, and carefully constructed character over tightly woven plot.
