Abstract
Vernon Lee’s relationship with Venice might be described as troublesome yet productive. It
informed a variety of her works including Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), her erudite
history of Italian culture which includes chapters on Venetian theatre that focus on Carlo Goldoni
and Carlo Gozzi; ‘A Wicked Voice’, a disturbing story of musical possession that appears in her
1890 collection, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories, in which a nineteenth-century composer becomes
obsessed with the voice of an eighteenth-century singer; her novella Lady Tal (1892), a light-hearted
satire in the realist mode; and The Prince of the Hundred Soups (1883), a children’s story that uses
stock characters from the commedia dell’arte to tell the tale of an opera singer, Signora Olimpia
Fantastici, and her adventures in ‘Bobbio’, a watery city that can only be Venice.