A little context can go a long way, especially when it’s from knowledgeable guides. My first encounter with Vernon Lee’s uncanny fiction came when I read the collection The Virgin of the Seven Daggers. I will confess that I don’t remember much else about it, the fact that I was reading it in 2020 goes a long way towards explaining that. I enjoyed Lee’s work enough that I was excited to see a new version of her 1890 collection Hauntings published with a conversation on the book (and Lee’s work) by Gretchen Felker-Martin and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya.
Both the book and the conversation that followed it left me impressed — both at the uncanny qualities of the fiction and the insights I received from the story from the discussion that followed it. Hauntings consists of four stories and a preface, written by Lee (aka Violet Paget) and concerning matters of supernatural fiction. “[M]y four little tales are of no genuine ghosts in the scientific sense,” Lee writes — a description that is accurate while also underselling just how bizarre some of these stories get.
That’s kind of the point, though. The reader knows something strange is coming, but not necessarily the specifics — which still puts them a few steps ahead of the characters. Two of the four stories here concern themselves with sinister presences that defy easy classification. “Dionea” tells of the life of a young woman who appears mysteriously as a foundling child and seems to cause escalating chaos as she grows older, while “A Wicked Voice” recounts the corrosive effects of one particular signing voice.
The collection’s other two stories, “Amour Dure” and “Oke of Okehurst” explore the cyclical effects of time and the reverberations of centuries-old acts of violence. Lee understood well the appeal of ambiguity; there are versions of these stories in which a Van Helsing figure wanders in and qualifies everything. That isn’t the case here; instead, Lee’s characters are rational people trying to better understand events that upend their worldview.
In their conversation that closes out this volume, Gretchen Felker-Martin and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya explore the subtext of these stories. Lee was a lesbian writer at a time when directly writing about her sexuality would have been challenging, if not impossible. Over the course of their conversation, Felker-Martin and Upadhyaya explore the ways that Lee pushed at different boundaries in ways that were ahead of their time and remain fascinating today.
“It shows a really sophisticated understanding of not just what gender is and what gender roles are, but how people who are outside consideration of these roles react to their violation,” Felker-Martin writes. There are plenty of reasons why writers interested in the history of supernatural fiction might want to seek Lee’s work out; in their conversation, Felker-Martin and Upadhyaya also make an excellent case for the pleasures of her bibliography.
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Hauntings
By Vernon Lee; commentary by Gretchen Felker-Martin and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Unnamed Press/Smith & Taylor Classics; 186 p.