Out now: a special issue of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens on Vernon Lee, edited by Christophe Gelly and Emilie Laurent. The issue brings together papers presented at the September 2025 conference ‘Vernon Lee and the European Cultural Heritage: Reciprocal Influences and Intermedial Dialogue.’

“The articles in this volume result from the conference entitled ‘Vernon Lee and the European cultural heritage: reciprocal influences and intermedial dialogue’, which was held on September 18–19, 2025, and organised by Christophe Gelly and Emilie Laurent with the support of the International Vernon Lee Society (IVLS) and the SFEVE society. The 11 interdisciplinary articles contained in this volume, along with an introduction, shed light on the richness and complexity of the work of Vernon Lee (1856–1935), a cosmopolitan British author and essayist who was precociously European-minded. Using an approach that is as much literary, pictorial, and mythological as it is biographical, psychological, and scientific, these 11 articles testify to Lee’s unrelenting efforts to rethink the European cultural heritage and to build a truly intermedial aesthetic, thus paving the way for contemporary reflections on the hybridity of forms and the circulation of artistic influences across Europe.” (source)

Contents

Introduction
Christophe Gelly and Emilie Laurent

Part 1: Intellectual and Intertextual Exchanges

Violet Paget and Telemaco Signorini: Mutual Esteem and Promotion in Florence at the fin de siècle
Eduardo De Maio

From Miss Brown to Alice Oke: Jane Morris as Pre-Raphaelite Muse Revisited by Vernon Lee
Michele Brugnetti

« A critical duet » : les échanges épistolaires de Vernon Lee et Irene Forbes-Mosse autour de la musique
Claire McKeown and Kerstin Wiedemann

‘Read thirty years ago and long since forgotten’: T. H. Huxley’s Romanes Lecture (1893) in Vernon Lee’s Proteus or the Future of Intelligence (1925)
Michel Prum

Part 2: Intermedial Practices

Vernon Lee’s ‘A Wedding Chest’: Preserving the Renaissance
Catherine Maxwell

Sacred or Profane Love? Iconotropy and the Victorian Renaissance in Vernon Lee’s ‘Dionea’
Emilie Laurent

Rewilding Venus: The Intermedial Ecologies of Vernon Lee’s ‘Dionea’ and ‘St. Eudæmon and His Orange-Tree’
Elizabeth Howard and Stefanie John

Vernon Lee’s Vision of Ecological Crisis and Dantean Hell
Zaynub Zaman

Part 3: Dialogue in Ethics and Aesthetics

Trying to Imagine: Representation, Empathy, and Ethical Failure in Vernon Lee’s ‘The Legend of Madame Krasinska’
Nicole Fluhr

Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics of Empathy in ‘The Doll’
Thomas Albrecht

Art as a Training-Place: Attention and Aesthetic Training in Vernon Lee
Orsolya Albert