ABSTRACT
In the opening chapter to a collection of essays entitled Belcaro (1881), Vernon Lee describes her sensations on completing her first published work, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880):
This eighteenth-century world, the subject of her literary debut, for which she had acquired a love ‘at an age ... where some of us are still creatures of an unconscious play-instinct’ functioned as a ‘remote lumber-room full of discarded mysteries and of lurking ghosts, where a half-grown young prig might satisfy, in unsuspicious gravity mere childlike instincts of make-believe and romance’ (Lee 1907, xvi). For Lee, the child that played in this world had been replaced by ‘Another myself’: a more discerning and discursive self who saw ‘what the original collector had never guessed: illustrations, partial explanations’, and ‘questions of artistic genesis and evolution, of artistic right and wrong’ and ‘This new myself’, she writes, ‘is the myself by whom has been written this present book’ (1881, 4). The passage implies a system of development and individuation that is played out through Lee’s responses to Italian art and culture in the earlier text. Lee’s words suggest not only the discovery of the self, but an anxiety to present herself as a mature writer who has surfaced from the chrysalis of childhood fantasy and engaged in the adult language of philosophy and aesthetics. Yet, her other self, the ‘bewitched’ child, continues to haunt the pages of Belcaro.
