Dear readers,
United in and by the Covid19 crisis, wherever we may be living, we have all been, and still are, more or less severely impacted, physically, psychologically or socially, by the pandemic. My dearest hope is that you and your families are safe and sound. But extreme prudence remains necessary. Please take care of yourself as well as of others!
During lockdown, our association, the International Vernon Lee Society, has been kept alive and thriving by our social network magician Sally Blackburn-Daniels (Open University UK), to whom I extend my warmest gratitude. And in Italy, Federica Parretti, of the Associazione Culturale Il Palmerino, has also shown us that one can communicate and share moments of springtime bliss, even in times of deepest anxiety, which, I am sorry to confess, has been more than I have been able to do.
A number of scheduled conferences, study days, classes or training sessions have been cancelled, postponed or transformed into online virtual meetings. New communication practices have emerged and the importance of online research tools, libraries and databases has by now clearly been established. Publishing on the internet has become the most widely used way of circulating or accessing knowledge.
This has proved a major incentive to the development of some projects, like Holographical-Lee (HoL): Lettres, carnets et manuscrits de Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935), soon to be published, as part of the eMan platform (ITEM-CNRS-ENS).
Sally Blackburn-Daniels of the IVLS, along with her colleagues from the Open University READ-IT project Alessio Antonini and Francesca Benatti, have produced the paper “On Links To Be: Exercises in Style #2”. The paper bridges the perspective of scholarly editions and authorial technologies by providing a new perspective on marginalia: as links to the future works of authors and a semantic of marginalia informing the development of a new generation of reading/authoring tools, in collaboration with the Holographical-Lee (HoL) project. The team presented their paper at the 31st edition of the ACM HyperText conference (14 July 2020), and were awarded the Douglas Engelbert Best Paper Award.
Papers, articles and books about Vernon Lee have also been produced.
Caoilfhionn Ni Bheachàin and Angus Mitchell, “Alice Stopford Green and Vernon Lee: Salon Culture and Intellectual Exchange,” Journal of Victorian Culture, 2020, Vol. 25, No. 1, 77-94. doi: 10.1093/jvcult/vcz053
Patricia Rigg’s biography A. Mary F. Robinson 1857-1944: Victorian Aestheticist and Modern Woman of Letters, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, is in press.
Sophie Geoffroy (ed.), Amanda Gagel (assoc. ed.), Selected Letters of Vernon Lee 1856-1935, Volume II, New York & London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, is in press.
Please help us update our bibliography by sending us information about your current research or publication activity.
SincereLEE yours
Sophie Geoffroy
