1 Vernon Lee to Roger Fry, 31 January 1933. Vernon Lee Archive, Colby College, Waterville, ME. I have kept the crossings-out of the original. Lee’s mention of questionnaires submitted to school children may be a reference to the experiments conducted in Germany by Rudolf Schulze at the beginning of the century. See, Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen, Leipzig, R. Voigtländer, 1906. See also, Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017, p. 1–11.
2 Charles Lalo, Esquisse d’une esthétique musicale scientifique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1908), p. 29. Lee annotated this particular passage in her own copy of the book VL 782 LAL, now in the Vernon Lee Library, British Institute in Florence. See also J.-M. Guyau, Pages choisies des grands écrivains, Paris, Armand Colin, 1895. Her own copy of the book VL 840 GUY is also heavily annotated.
3 Kit was a nickname given by Lee to Clementina. Susan Lanzoni, ‘Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics of Empathy’, Journal of the History of Behavioural Science, 45/4, 2009, p. 330–54; Carolyn Burdett, ‘“The subjective inside us can turn into the objective outside“: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 12, 2011, http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk; Kirsty Bunting, ‘“Feeling of Vivid Fellowship”: Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson’s Quest for Collaborative “Aesthetic Sociability”’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 52/2, 2016, p. 203–17; Francesco Ventrella, ‘Encountering Niobe’s Children: Vernon Lee’s Queer Formalism and the Empathy of Sculpture’, in J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2019, p. 195–219.
4 Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness I’, Contemporary Review, 72, October 1897, p. 544–69; and ‘Beauty and Ugliness II’, Contemporary Review, 72, November 1897, p. 669–88; reprinted with annotations in Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 153–239.
5 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness I’, p. 546. See also Thomas Petrashka, ‘“Theirs Is the Future Way of Studying Aesthetics”. Vernon Lee and the German Aesthetics of Empathy’, in Thomas Petrashka and Christian Werners (eds.), Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art, New York, Routledge, 2023, p. 296–314.
6 Norman Wilde, ‘Psychological Literature’, Psychological Review, 5/1, 1898, p. 103.
7 Kate Gordon, ‘Aesthetics’ [Review of the book Beauty and ugliness and other studies in psychological aesthetics, by V. Lee & C. Anstruther-Thomson], Psychological Bulletin, 9/11, 1912, p. 431.
8 Anon., ‘Reviews: Modern Aesthetics’, The Nation, 27 July 1912, p. 627.
9 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness I’, p. 544. The article also ends on a methodological note: ‘our object in the present paper has been mainly not to establish fact, but to suggest a method’. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness II’, p. 686.
10 Vernon Lee to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 1 January 1902. Vernon Lee Archive, Colby College, Waterville, ME.
11 Vernon Lee, ‘Introduction’, in C. Anstruther-Thomson, Art and Man. Fragments and Essays, ed. by Vernon Lee, London, John Lane, 1924, p. 27–9.
12 Lee, ‘Introduction’, Art and Man, p. 47. Lee had studied the first volume of Carl Stumpf’s Tonpsychologie (1883).
13 Lee, ‘Introduction’, p. 29.
14 Ethel Smyth, What Happened Next, London, Longmans, Green and Co, 1940, p. 27.
15 Quoted in Burdett Gardner, The Lesbian Imagination, Victorian Style: A Psychological and Critical Study of ‘Vernon Lee’, New York, Garland, 1987, p. 60. For a discussion of Russel’s portrait of Vernon Lee in relation to her physical and intellectual presentation, see Francesco Ventrella, ‘Voicing the Queer Self. Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee’, Art History, 46/3, 2023, p. 428–57.
16 See for instance, Ventrella, ‘Encountering Niobe’s Children’, p. 195–219; Bunting, ‘“Feeling of Vivid Fellowship”’, p. 203–17; Joseph Bristow, ‘Vernon Lee’s Art of Feeling’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 25/1, 2006, p. 117-139; Kathy Psomiades, ‘“Still Burning from this Strangling Embrace”: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics’, in R. Dellamora (ed.), Victorian Sexual Dissidence, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 21–41.
17 Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 280; René Wellek, ‘Vernon Lee, Bernard Berenson, and Aesthetics’, Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970, p. 164–86. For a comprehensive discussion of the accusation of plagiarism, see Mandy Gagel, ‘1897, A Discourse of Plagiarism: Letters Between Vernon Lee, Bernard Berenson, and Mary Costelloe’, Literary Imagination, 12/2, 2010, p. 154–79. For an exception to such limited understanding of Lee’s collaborative methods for art theory see Witney Davis, Queer Beauty. Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond, New York, Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 176–85.
18 Frank Büttner, ‘Das Paradigma “Einfühlung” bei Robert Vischer, Heinrich Wölfflin und Wilhelm Worringer. Die problematische Karriere einer kunsttheoretischen Fragestellung’, in Christian Drude (ed.), 200 Jahre Kunstgeschichte in München. Positionen—Perspektiven—Polemik, 1780–1980, Munich, Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003, p. 82.
19 Priyanka Basu, ‘Ornament and Empathy in August Schmarsow’s Psychophysical History of Art’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 67/68, 2017–18, p. 100–1.
20 Jill R. Ehnenn, Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008, p. 168.
21 Ehnenn, Women’s Literary Collaboration, p. 169.
22 Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness’, Feminist Studies, 16/1, Spring 1990, p. 115–50.
23 For a comparison of Schmarsow and Wölfflin’s architectural theories, see Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object. Genealogies of Architectural Modernism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012, p. 140–1.
24 Vernon Lee, Laurus Nobilis. Chapters on Art and Life, London, John Lane, 1907, p. 50–1.
25 Zeynep Çelik, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2017.
26 Kirsty Bunting, ‘“Feelings of Vivid fellowship”: Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson’s Quest for Collaborative “Aesthetic Sociability”’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 52/2, 2016, p. 207.
27 Lee, Laurus Nobilis, p. 110. Bunting has observed that Lee started to incorporate Anstruther-Thomson’s notes as early as 1892, when she was writing an essay on the architecture of Lombard Villas which appeared in Cosmopolis only four years later. Bunting, “‘Feelings of Vivid Fellowship”’, p. 206. See Vernon Lee, ‘Old Lombard and Venetian Villas’, Cosmopolis, 2, 1896, p. 49–59.
28 ‘I believe that if one learned, not merely to know, but to feel, to enjoy very completely and very specifically, the quality of distinctiveness and reserve, slightness of means and greatness of proportions, of the domestic architecture and decoration of the fifteenth century, if one made one’s own the mood underlying the special straight lines and curves, the symmetry and hiatus of the colonnades, for instance, inside Florentine houses; of the little bits of carving on escutcheon and fireplace of Tuscan hillside farms; let alone of the plainest sepulchral slabs in Santa Croce, one would be in better case for really appreciating, say, Botticelli or Pier della Francesca than after ever so much comparison of their work with that of other painters’. Lee, Laurus Nobilis, p. 168.
29 Giuseppe Sergi, William James, Edmond Gurney and Carl Lange are ostensibly the main four references for their research at this time.
30 Lee’s own copy of Lipps’ book now at the British Institute in Florence (VL 111.85 LIP) contains plenty of notes scattered throughout the book and can be dated after 1897.
31 Theodor Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen, Leipzig, J. A. Barth, 1897, p. 79.
32 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness’, p. 195.
33 See Rainer Schütze, ‘Architecture as Bodily and Spatial Art: The Idea of Einfühlung in early Theoretical Contributions by Heinrich Wölfflin and August Schmarsow’, Architectural Theory Review, 18/3, 2013, p. 293–309.
34 On Scott’s German influences, see Raúl Martínez Martínez, ‘Geoffrey Scott and Modern Architectural Thought: The Creation of a Legacy throughout the Twentieth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 80/4, 2019, p. 597–619. Still in 1925, one reviewer of Scott’s second edition stated: ‘modern architecture has long suffered from lack of clear thinking, and philosophic criticism such as Mr. Scott provides is a health-giving tonic’. M.S.B., ‘The Architecture of Humanism’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 268/47, July 1925, p. 59.
35 Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Architecture’, in Art and Man, p. 186.
36 Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness’, in Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 187. My quotes refer to the 1912 reprint of the article, which contains information about their collaboration.
37 Anstruther-Thomson’s original notes on architecture, including the passages on Santa Maria Novella, were posthumously edited by Lee and included in Art and Man, p. 185–206.
38 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness’, p. 197.
39 ‘Indem ich den Gegenstand apperzipiere, erlebe ich als von ihm herkommend, oder in ihm, als apperzipiertem, hegend, einen Antrieb zu einer bestimmten Weise des inneren Verhaltens. Diese erscheint als durch ihn gegeben, mir von ihm mitgeteilt’, Lipps, Raumästhetik, p. 187.
40 ‘Räumliche Bewegung ist mechanisches Geschehen’; and “Die räumliche Tätigkeit, die ich in der Linie finde, schliefst aber zweierlei in sich: Einmal die Bewegung, und zum andern das Tun, das in der Bewegung sich verwirklicht oder befriedigt’. Lipps, Raumästhetik, p. 227.
41 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness’, 197. To endorse this point, the authors make a comparison with the way in which we might follow the movement of music by moving our heads.
42 Jesse Prinz, ‘Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics. Empathy, Emotion, and Embodiment’, in Petrashka and Werners (eds.), Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art, p. 318.
43 Theodor Lipps, Die ästhetische Betrachtung und die bildende Kunst, Hamburg, Leopold Voss, 1906, p. 427–9. The offprint of these pages, heavily annotated, is also part of Lee’s own library, VL 111.85 LIP.
44 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness I’, p. 553.
45 Basu, ‘Ornament and Empathy’, p. 98.
46 Theodor Lipps, ‘Dritter aesthetischer Literaturbericht,’ Archiv für Systematische Philosophie 6/3, 1900, p. 377–409; Lee, ‘The Central Problem,’ Beauty and Ugliness, p. 96–7. For a close reading of Lipps’ review of ‘Beauty and Ugliness’ see Petraschka, ‘“Theirs is the Future Way of Studying Aesthetics”’, p. 303–6.
47 Vernon Lee to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 9 October 1901. Vernon Lee Archive, Colby College, Waterville, ME. For a discussion of Lee’s objections to Lipps in her published work, also see Petraschka, ‘“Theirs is the Future Way of Studying Aesthetics”’, p. 306–11.
48 Emma von Ritoók, ’Zur Analyse der ästhetischen Wirkung auf Grund der Methode der Zeitvariation’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 5, 1910, p. 356–407.
49 For a discussion of the way in which Lee and Anstruther-Thomson queered the discourse of psychological aesthetics, see Ventrella, ‘Encountering Niobe’s Children’, p. 195–219.
50 From the answers of 48 respondents, Lee was then able to complete a single-authored article; Vernon Lee, ‘Weiteres über Einfühlung und ästhetisches Miterleben’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 5, 1910, p. 145–90; translated and reprinted as ‘The Central Problem of Aesthetics’, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 77–155. Note also that the section ‘Aesthetic Responsiveness’ includes the gallery diaries of Maria Waser-Krebs and an unidentified ‘Mlle C.’ based in Paris. On the origins of and collaborations around the questionnaire see Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 96–9. For a later reflection on the use of questionnaires, see Vernon Lee, ‘Über Umfrage und Sammelforschung in der Ästhetik’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 2, 1907, p. 535–47.
51 Karl Groos to Violet Paget, 15 February 1901. Papers of Vernon Lee, Somerville College Library.
52 Karl Groos to Violet Paget, 7 January 1902. Papers of Vernon Lee, Somerville College Library.
53 Karl Groos to Violet Paget, 30 July 1901. Papers of Vernon Lee, Somerville College Library.
54 Vernon Lee published the gallery diaries she kept from 1901 until 1904 under the title ‘Aesthetic Responsiveness: Its Variations and Accompaniments’ in the edited volume of essays Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics, London, John Lane, 1912, p. 241–350. A selection of the gallery diaries has been recently republished in Vernon Lee, The Psychology of an Art Writer, ed. by Dylan Kenny, New York, David Zwirner, 2018, p. 46–132.
55 On this important point, see Bunting, “‘Feelings of Vivid Fellowship”’, p. 214–5.
56 Lee, ‘Introduction,’ Art and Man, p. 74–5. Burdett, ‘The Subjective Inside Us’.
57 Bunting, “‘Feelings of Vivid Fellowship”’, p. 212.
58 Ehnenn, Literary Collaboration, p. 172.
59 Schmarsow introduces his argument thus: ‘Raumgefühl und Raumphantasie drängen zur Raum-gestaltung und suchen ihre Befriedigung in einer Kunst; wir nennen sie Architektur und können sie deutsch kurzweg als Raumgestalterin bezeichnen’. August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, Leipzig, Kark Hiersemann, 1894, p. 11. See also Mitchell W. Schwarzer, ‘The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of Raumgestaltung’, Assemblage, 15, 1991, p. 48–61. More recently, this concept has been reassessed also by Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object, p. 139–40.
60 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness’, p. 187–8.
61 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. by Kathrin Simon, London, Fontana, 1966, p. 80.
62 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, p. 77.
63 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness’, p. 193.
64 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, p. 58–9.
65 Vernon Lee to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 28 December 1907. Vernon Lee Archive, Colby College, Waterville, ME.
66 Fragments of this project from Anstruther-Thomson’s notes on Renaissance art in Florence will be included by Lee in Art and Man (1924), along with two co-authored essays also on Florentine themes.
67 Anstruther-Thomson to Vernon Lee, 12 April, 1904. Vernon Lee Archive, Colby College, Waterville, ME.
68 Vernon Lee to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 19 August, 1903. Vernon Lee Archive, Colby College, Waterville, ME.
69 Lene Østermark-Johansen, Sweetness and Strength: The Reception of Michelangelo in Late Victorian England, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1998.
70 Maria Waser-Krebs (1878–1939) was the daughter of Lee’s German tutor. After attending the Gymnasium in Bern, she was sent to Il Palmerino in 1901 where she helped Lee with her work on psychological aesthetics and art, and was introduced to Anstruther Thomson and Maud Cruttwell who had a particular influence on her education. See Ricarda Gerosa, ‘Zum Briefwechsel von Vernon Lee und Maria Waser: 1903–1935’, in Serena Cenni, Sophie Geoffroy, Elisa Bizzotto (eds.), Violet del Palmerino. Aspetti della cultura cosmopolita di Vernon Lee: 1889-1935, Florence, Edizioni dell’Assemblea, 2014, p. 109–19.
71 Vernon Lee to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 19 August, 1903. Vernon Lee Archive, Colby College, Waterville, ME.
72 Vernon Lee to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 27 March 1904. Vernon Lee Archive, Colby College, Waterville, ME.
73 Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Michelangelo’s Medicean Tombs: A Study on Artistic Psychology’, The Architectural Review, 16/94, 1904, p. 101–10. Reprinted in Anstruther-Thomson and Lee, Art and Man, p. 297–321.
74 One exception is Lene Østermark-Johansen, who makes reference to the literary tropes of this article in relation to its unpublished twin on Desiderio’s Tomb of Carlo Marsuppini. Lene Østermark-Johansen, ‘“Life is movement”: Vernon Lee and Sculpture’, Word & Image, 34/1, 2018, p. 64–72.
75 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Michelangelo’s Medicean Tombs’, p. 101.
76 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Michelangelo’s Medicean Tombs’, p. 103.
77 On this episode, see footnote 17.
78 Lee and Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness’, p. 234.
79 Brown, ‘Bernard Berenson and “Tactile Values” in Florence’, p. 101–20.
80 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Michelangelo’s Medicean Tombs’, p. 108.
81 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Michelangelo’s Medicean Tombs’, p. 109.
82 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Michelangelo’s Medicean Tombs’, p. 106. On the observations on Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love as a site of lesbian encounter, see the important analysis by Bunting, “‘Feelings of Vivid Fellowship”’, especially p. 210–1.
83 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, ‘Michelangelo’s Medicean Tombs’, p. 104.
84 Lee and Thomson, ‘Beauty and Ugliness’, p. 225.
85 Clementina Anstruther-Thomson to Vernon Lee, 17 September 1904. Vernon Lee Archive, Colby College, Waterville, ME.