Vernon Lee and the Spirit of the Place

Any collection of classic ghost stories of the Victorian and Edwardian periods is sure to contain at least one story by Vernon Lee (1856-1935). In his marvellous introduction to "The Supernatural Omnibus" (1931) Montague Summers compares her to M R James in her mastery of atmospheric detail and goes so far as to say that neither James nor Sheridan Le Fanu can be ranked above the genius displayed in her greatest collection of supernatural fiction "Hauntings" (Heinemann 1890).







There are four stories in "Hauntings", revealing the power of the past to influence with disastrous consequences those who fall under the particular spell lingering at the site of previous events. Three are set in Italy, where Vernon Lee spent many years of her life. In 'A Wicked Voice' a composer residing in Venice is haunted by the voice of a long dead singer and longs for death while listening to the magical sound. The hero of 'Amour Dure', a Renaissance scholar, is pursued to his death by the ghost of a famous 16th century beauty, who was murdered by one of the many lovers whose hearts she broke, and now seeks revenge on the living.

'Oke of Okehurst' (my favourite) is set at a country house in Kent. Mrs Oke's portrait is being painted and she chooses to dress in the style of a previous Mrs Oke, who, centuries earlier had conspired with her husband to murder her lover Lovelock. Mr Oke becomes more and more jealous as his wife becomes obsessed with this story and imagines she is having an affair with the ghost of Lovelock. He finally kills both himself and his wife.

These stories are much richer than can be conveyed by a brief summary and all offer multiple interpretations given the suspect psychological states of those being haunted. That Vernon Lee herself was acutely sensitive to the effects of certain places on the mind is evident not only from these stories but also from her many travel essays and occasional writings.

Violet Paget, who wrote under the name Vernon Lee, was born in a chateau near Boulogne to English parents who spent much time on the continent. In later life she chose Italy as her country of choice but did spend time in England, for example at the village of Fladbury in Worcestershire. The best recent study of her life and work is Vineta Colby's "Vernon Lee: a Literary Biography", published by the University of Virginia Press in 2003.



She was a formidable scholar, steeped in Italian and Renaissance history, and this adds considerable depth to her stories set in Italy. She had a wide circle of literary and academic friends including Robert Browning, Henry James, Walter Pater and Bertrand Russell. Her first book, published in 1880, was "Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy"; her final book was "Music and its Lovers", published in 1932. In between came many books covering her range of interests, particularly essays on travel and places special to her.



One of the best of these I find on the shelves is "The Enchanted Woods and other Essays on the Spirit of the Place" (John Lane 1905). This is a lovely collection of essays covering special places in many European countries, such as Arles, Brive-La-Gailarde and Venice. Perhaps the best introduction to her particular genius for seeking out aesthetic beauty in landscape is contained in a paragraph in the essay that gave this volume its title:

'We need undertake no voyages of discovery to meet the Genius Loci. There is a presiding spirit, an oread, in every venerable and well-grown tree, overtopping the forest or lonely upon the ploughed ridges; a naiad in every well-head, among the trickling cress and the mossy stones; nay, even in every cistern of fair masonry and pure beryl water open to the sky, where watering-cans are filled of evenings. And as to enchanted woods, why, they lie in many parks and girdle many cities; only you must know them when you see them, and submit willingly to their beneficient magic. Thus we enrich our life, not by the making of far-fetched plans, nor by the seeking of change and gain; but by the faithful putting to profit of what is within our grasp.'

We visited such a sacred place, the Lady's Well at Holystone in Northumberland, on a recent holiday and if the spirits of the water do not reside here then they are no more.



Her philosophy of life is contained in a much reprinted work "Hortus Vitae, Essays on the Gardening of Life", which discusses subjects such as reading books, hearing music, the virtues of silence and returning to favourite places, anticipating by a hundred years some of the recent writings of Alain de Botton.



But to return to the works for which she is most well known - her supernatural short stories. "Hauntings" was so good that it was unlikely her other collections would reach the same standard. However there is much that is good in these.







"Pope Jacynth and other Fantastic Tales" (John Lane 1907) contains four supernatural tales, perhaps the best is 'Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady', set in Italy and in which a spell is cast on an ancestor of Prince Alberic by the Snake Lady, demanding faithfulness for ten years. This condition is not met when the present prince meets the Snake Lady, resulting in his death.



"For Maurice, Five Unlikely Tales" (John Lane 1927) contains the first Vernon Lee story I read - "The Virgin of the Seven Daggers", contained in the anthology "Fifty Years of Ghost Stories".



One of Vernon Lee's most atmospheric essays is "Ravenna and her Ghosts", which I first encountered in a Corgi Books paperback of her tales. This tells the legend of a damsel pursued by a ghostly hunt in the forest of Classis, together with a meditation on Ravenna, its churches and its history. In the essay Vernon Lee captures beautifully the melancholy of old Italian towns at night:

"Other places become solemn, sad, or merely beautiful at sunset. But Ravenna, it seems to me, grows actually ghostly; the Past takes it back at that moment, and the ghosts return to the surface. For it is, after all, a nest of ghosts. They hang about all those silent damp churches; invisible, or at most tantalising one with a sudden gleam which may, after all, be only that of the mosaics, an uncertain outline which, when you near it, is after all, only a pale grey column. But one feels their breathing all round. They are legion, but I do not know who they are."



This wonderful essay first appeared in the collection "Limbo and other Essays", another excellent book. Consider the first lines of the essay "In Praise of Old Houses" - 'My Yorkshire friend was saying that she hated being in an old house. There seemed to be other people in it besides the living .....'
Being lucky enough to live in an old house, possibly of medieval origin, I too have felt this, but with a quite different response to that of Vernon Lee's friend.



Browsing the shelves I find three small volumes, each revealing a different facet of the multi-talented Vernon Lee.

"The Handling of Words and other Studies in Literary Psychology" is a detailed academic treatise on writing style, with analysis of writers as diverse as Carlyle, Kipling, Hardy and Henry James. In this work, Vernon Lee stresses the need for the writer to stimulate the reader's own imagination and shows how good writing achieves this.







An attractive copy of "Ottilie, an Eighteenth Century Idyll" is next. This is a short story, set in Germany, in which Christoph tells of his childhood and early life with his sister Ottilie, who, following the death of their mother when he was born, is responsible for her brother's education and upbringing. Their life together is interrupted for many years when Christoph marries the unsuitable Wilhelmine. Eventually, the marriage ends in acrinomy and Christoph returns to Ottilie. The two then grow old together. A simple story, but so beautifully told that it seems to convey much more than is described in the actual events.



Vernon Lee wrote one play, "Ariadne in Mantua". We have an American Edition of this published by the 'Prince of Pirates', Thomas Bird Mosher of Portland Maine. Mosher was inspired by the private press movement in Britain and his books (albeit, at times, pirated) are very beautiful. This copy is no exception with its soft covers with yapped edges and elegant typeface. I suspect Vernon Lee would have approved.



In recent years it has been relatively easy to find editions of Vernon Lee's ghost stories.



In the fifties Peter Owen published two volumes, "Supernatural Tales" and "Pope Jacynth and More Fantastic Tales". The former has an excellent introduction by Irene Cooper Willis.



Broadview Editions have produced "Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales", containing the four stories from "Hauntings" and three others. This has a long introduction, chronology of Vernon Lee's life, copious notes and several appendices by her contemporaries.

But the best place to find all of her supernatural stories and her two essays on the ghosts of Ravenna and the supernatural in art is the Ash-Tree Press edition of 2002, edited by David W Rowlands, who supplies a good introduction. The portrait used for the cover was painted by John Singer Sargent.



Vernon Lee was a consummate artist; one of the most graceful writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, even if it is nowadays only her classic ghost stories that are read, she has left a body of work on music, landscape and aesthetic appreciation that is unlikely to be bettered.



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Pleasure in Being Frightened

When I was a child we lived in an old farmhouse with dark corridors leading to bedrooms rarely visited. Having two older brothers it is not surprising that I was introduced to stories of ghosts and witches at an early age. The most terrifying room, however, was the sitting room, only used for social events, that lay at the far end of the house from the parlour, where we spent most of our time. Even on a warm summer day, I did not care to linger there. But the frisson of fear was never altogether unpleasant and it is to these apparently harmless childhood terrors that I attribute my love of ghost stories.

The first ghost story I remember was read to us by our live-in land girl, one night when my brother and I had just been put to bed. With hindsight, A E D Smith's 'The Coat', in which an old moth-eaten greatcoat, first seen hanging from a coat hook, attempts to strangle an unwary visitor to an uninhabited house with it's horribly flapping empty arms, may not seem the most suitable night-time reading for 6 year olds, but it is the only bed-time story from that period that I actually remember. Years later, I found the story again in 'The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries', in a part of the book invitingly called 'Sealed Section'. The coat belonged to a disreputable person who had been shot when wearing it and now apparently waits in the house for those staple ghost story characters who know something's wrong but still persist in invoking any malevolent spirit in the area.

Since then there has rarely been a period of my reading life in which ghost stories have not been close at hand. At first it was through anthologies, such as the superb collection 'Fifty Years of Ghost Stories', in which I first read M R James and Sheridan Le Fanu, both of whose stories are just as fresh 50 years later.



There were also the excellent Faber and Faber collections 'Best Horror Stories', with it's wonderful Felix Kelly dust wrapper, and 'Best Ghost Stories', followed by Basil Davenport's anthologies 'Ghostly Tales To Be Told' and 'Tales To Be Told In The Dark'. It was in these latter collections that I first read Arthur Machen.



Once I had read the massive Wise and Fraser anthology 'Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural' and Montague Summers' 'Supernatural Omnibus', I was in a position to sort out the great writers from the merely competent. I also began slowly to search out the original volumes by these authors from which their stories had been drawn by the anthologists.

So, who are these great authors and what are the key books that constitute a ghost story collection?

Most, myself included, would place M R James at the head of the list. His four volumes 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary', 'More Ghost Stories', 'A Thin Ghost and Others' and 'A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories' were published between 1904 and 1926 and define what has come to be known as the antiquarian or scholarly ghost story. Oblivious to warning signs that are blindingly obvious to the reader, M R James's typical hero, pursuing his antiquarian interests will insist on provoking the malevolent entity that will either finish him off in a particularly nasty way or guarantee him (and us) future nightmares and other unpleasant moments.





As to what are the best stories from the 30 or so written by MRJ, strong claims may be made for 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad', from the first of the four volumes (published in 1904) and 'Casting the Runes', from the next volume (1911). I do have a particular fondness for the superbly titled 'The Tractate Middoth', from 'More Ghost Stories', partly because most of the action takes place in a library, which I assume to be the Fitzwilliam. It is the removal of the book of the title from the library that precipitates the rather nasty revenge taken on the borrower, when a 'little dark form' rises out of the shadow behind a tree trunk and two arms emerge to cover his face in a 'mass of blackness'. Those staple trappings of ghost stories, cobwebs and spiders, feature prominently in this story.



E F Benson, like M R James, produced four excellent volumes of ghost stories, beginning with 'The Room in the Tower' in 1912, followed by 'Visible and Invisible', 'Spook Stories' and 'More Spook Stories' (1934). Though variable in quality, there is much to enjoy here, my own favourites being 'The Face' and 'Pirates', both much anthologized. In the latter story, a middle-aged man purchases the house of his childhood, long deserted, and restores it to its former state when he and his brothers and sisters, now all dead, used to play in the garden. Living more and more in the past, he finally joins the phantom children in a game of Pirates and is found dead the next morning. The ghosts in this story are the ghosts of childhood; it is significant that the house had been re-furnished with much of it's original furniture, returned to the house after some 40 years. This re-creation of the past brings back the former inhabitants of the house. Or is it all down to an over-active imagination and a weak heart? As with all the best ghost stories, there are several possible interpretations.



Ghosts of children, or ghosts haunting children, are plentiful, from the vengeful children with the fearfully long finger-nails, who return to tear the heart out of the unfortunate Mr Abney, in M R James' 'Lost Hearts', to little Miles and Flora, corrupted by the ghosts of their former governess and her lover, in 'The Turn of the Screw', or again is the whole nightmare visited on the children by their paranoid new governess, the un-named young lady who narrates the story?

It is time to introduce the third of the writers who, to me, define the English Ghost Story. This is, paradoxically, an Irishman, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who, along with his admirer, James Joyce, is associated in my mind with Dublin in a way that no other city or writer is. Whenever in Dublin, I stand outside the house on Merrion Square from which Le Fanu emerged for his nocturnal walks round Dublin and in which he is supposed to have succumbed to his final nightmare. Walking the lonelier streets of Dublin, I listen for the following phantom footsteps that pursued Captain Barton to his terrifying end in 'The Familiar' and in a quieter section of Aungier Street, I observe a deserted house with grass and small trees growing from the roof that I would like to have been the setting for Le Fanu's short tale 'An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street'. This short topographical tour of Le Fanu's Dublin must end outside the much haunted 'House by the Churchyard' in Chapelizod, the setting for the Le Fanu novel so admired by James Joyce and one of the influences on his 'book of the dark', 'Finnegans Wake'.



There are many excellent stories by Le Fanu, collated originally from the magazines of the period by M J James in 'Madame Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery' (1923), but it is to 'In a Glass Darkly' (1872) that we must turn for what I consider to be the finest ghost stories of the nineteenth century. As well as 'The Familiar' and the justly celebrated 'Green Tea', we are introduced in this volume to the most terrifying vampire in literature, the wonderful Carmilla, immortalised for all the wrong reasons by the late Ingrid Pitt in the lurid and explicit film 'The Phantom Lovers'. It is worth quoting in full the last sentence of 'Carmilla':

"It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations- sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door"

To my mind the last phrase of this sentence captures the essence of the ghost story; it is in our unguarded moments that the phantoms of our own past as well of those of literature return to surprise us and, I sincerely hope, cause us not a few unpleasant moments.



I will end this all too brief survey with a personal selection - eleven of my favourite ghost stories, restricted to one per author. These are given in chronological order of publication.

'The Old Nurse's Story', Mrs Gaskell (1852)
'Mr Justice Harbottle', J Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)
'Oke of Okehurst', Vernon Lee (1890)
'The Turn of the Screw', Henry James (1898)
'Man Overboard', F Marion Crawford (1903)
'Afterward', Edith Wharton (1910)
'The Green Room', Walter de la Mare (1925)
'A Warning to the Curious', M R James (1926)
'The Face', E F Benson (1928)
'The Rosewood Door', Oliver Onions (1929)
'The Sweeper', X Private X (1931)

If not one of these stories makes you unwilling to look back as you turn the lights off when leaving an empty room on a dark night as the wind moans in the trees, then maybe ghost stories are not for you.

It has often been said that the ghosts of the nineteenth and early twentieth century did not survive in the era of electric lights and motor cars. This is only partly true; there are many modern writers who have maintained the traditions of the 'Golden Age' of the ghost story. In a later blog, I will turn my attention to some of these later practitioners of the art.







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