Abstract
This collection of essays ensued from ‘Vernon Lee 2019’, an international conference held to mark
the centenary of Lee’s return to her Italian home, Villa Il Palmerino, after enforced exile during
World War I. While Lee emerged as a significant writer in the heady atmosphere of late
nineteenth-century Aestheticism and decadence, she continued to publish extensively throughout
the first three decades of the twentieth century. Between 1900 and her death in 1935, she produced
a wealth of new material in a variety of genres including travel writing, novels, philosophical and
aesthetic treatises, and compilations of supernatural fiction. As the new century dawned, she also
became politically active; in the years leading up to World War I, her polemical pacifist articles
appeared in the periodical press and she wrote an important anti-war morality play, The Ballet of the
Nations: A Present-Day Morality (1915). In Beauty and Ugliness (1912) and The Beautiful (1913), she
took criticism in exciting new directions, focusing on the developing field of ‘psychological aesthetics’;
experimented with literary analysis in The Handling of Words (1923); and consolidated a lifelong
interest in musicology in Music and its Lovers (1932).