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This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension in what she describes as Leslie Stephen's otherwise all too rational 18th century. Even though she respects the impetus behind W. E. H. Lecky's progressively rationalizing thesis in his History of the Rise and Progress of Rationalism in Europe (1865), she has offered her own richly suggestive series of discrete genealogies that account for the survival of the uncanny into the 19th century and rightly make much of its continuing power. This chapter, therefore, takes the form of an archaeology of the haunting sense of the 18th-century past in the 19th-century present. Haunting is both a reality and a metaphor in Vernon Lee, and the 18th century was an important factor in this experience of haunting, as it was also to prove to be for M. R. James.

This chapter explores the difficulty of Vernon Lee's conception of empathy. It argues that her thinking about empathy was driven by a consideration of how we respond to the rhythms of music and visual art, and by her vitalistic interest in the energy of bodies. Lee began to explore the possibility of communal emotion, and how we might respond to the movements and gestures of others. However, this chapter shows how Lee struggled with her conception of empathy, both in terms of understanding how it might apply to the novel and to reading, and in terms of thinking about how feeling could be anything other than selfish: how it could be sympathetic. Her understanding of sympathy remains fragmentary, and implicitly suggests the need for the modernist techniques of Woolf and Lawrence. The chapter includes readings of Lee's novels Miss Brown and Louis Norbert, and her work on emotion and aesthetics.

This chapter discusses gender issues by acknowledging the crucially innovative form of the female-authored ghost story. It focuses on the works of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, and May Sinclair, who addressed themes of love, money and history. Riddell demonstrates an interest in the relationship between money and spectrality in The Uninhabited House, while Lee explores the place of women's writing within male historical narratives and even gives the notion of romantic love a historical inflection. Finally, the chapter takes a look at Sinclair, who questions the relationship between history and writing and examines the relationship between love, history and authorship.

This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the essay, the short story and the novel. The sublime is now treated as only one among a number of forms of imaginative vision used by chosen writers, all of whom are deeply indebted to Romantic influences. The analysis of the following writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – centres on the iconic aesthetic image of the human face and form mediated through shadows, spirits, ghosts, corpses, body substitutes, paintings, sculptures or sculptural fragments, and finds certain repeated motifs, such as the non-finito, the Michelangelesque incomplete or unfinished body, the suggestive fragment and the allied, widely used figure of synecdoche, the part for the whole, which so often acts as stimulus for the visionary imagination. These repeated images or patterns of images illuminate each author's creativity, aesthetic practice and understanding of the imagination. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter explores physiological novel theory's vexed relation with notions of ‘organic form’ by examining the discourse of psychophysics, a theory of the discrete building-blocks of consciousness, and how its description of ‘units of consciousness’ made older notions of organic wholeness untenable, as reflected in both Vernon Lee's essays on the novel form and George Meredith's ostentatiously fragmented The Egoist (1879).

This chapter argues that scientific approaches to aesthetics that were popular in Victorian culture constitute a suppressed alternative to New Critical interpretive practices that were foundational in professional literary study. Analyzing the literary critic Vernon Lee’s unusual synthesis of German physiological aesthetics, British aestheticism, and American quantitative textual analysis, the chapter shows how the concept of empathy became at once quantitative and embodied in Lee’s literary theory. In Beauty and Ugliness, Lee and her lover, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, developed strategies for empirical introspective analysis that were meant to demonstrate the effects of paintings and sculpture on the body. As Lee learned about the stylometric analysis of literature carried out in the United States, she expanded her empirical approach to include counting words and issuing surveys. Although this intersection of quantitative and affective approaches was largely disregarded by I.A. Richards and his progeny, it represents a vital prehistory of current approaches to the quantitative and empirical analysis of culture.

Early schooled in writing by a pedagogy rooted in dialogic exchange, Vernon Lee (1856–1935) made the interactive relationship between writer and reader central to her critical prose. Her early essays showcase her already distinctive prose voice—markedly different from a professional academic masculine voice. Quick to establish a rapport, Lee is a sympathetic guide, skilfully steering her readers through arguments and expositions, but also stimulating and involving them through impressionistic description, association, and intricate dynamic passages full of open-ended verb forms. Published in the 1890s and early 1900s, many of the essays in her innovative book The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology (1923) show her fascination with the idea of style as a form of contact and transaction between writer and reader, with style creating the perceptual patterns that persuade readers to think and imagine in ways not naturally their own.

This chapter, written by Karin Littau, addresses the media-transitional period of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to show how aestho-physiological experiments in reading were linked to a variety of motion picture technologies. On the one hand such technologies were used to measure reading speeds; on the other, they profoundly affected how readers began to perceive the printed word: no longer as static marks on the page but giving ‘the impression of movement’, which in turn was conceived ‘in proportion’ to how it ‘moved’ the reader. By focusing on experiments by Vernon Lee, Gertrude Stein, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and her story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (itself an experiment in phantasmagoric reading), Littau shows how reading during this period bore the traces of cinematicity; to the extent that in the 1930s ‘movie-minded’ writers like Robert Carlton Brown proposed ‘reading machines’, which would bring outmoded reading practices into line with modern cinema-viewing.

This chapter examines fellow feeling in Ford’s final Tietjens novel, Last Post (1928). In particular, the chapter tracks the ways in which eighteenth-century concepts of sympathy and twentieth-century concepts of empathy come up against each other in Ford’s text. After an historical overview of sympathy and empathy, the chapter suggests that while the first three novels of Ford’s tetralogy move us toward an exemplary experience of empathy with the series’ protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, Last Post steps back from modernist empathy and represents Tietjens by way of abstraction and eighteenth-century sympathy. By analyzing how sympathy and empathy mediate the traumatic effects of war on the mind in Last Post, this chapter argues that the often-neglected fourth part of Ford’s tetralogy is in fact central to the series’ coherence.

Chapter Four, “Empathy and Violence in the Works of Ford Madox Ford,” uses the first work on aesthetic empathy in Britain, that of Vernon Lee and T. E. Hulme, to read Ford’s novels The Good Soldier (1915) and A Man Could Stand Up– (1926). This chapter suggests that Ford’s work contains a reconciliation of the seemingly incompatible theories of Lee and Hulme. A reading of The Good Soldier shows how Ford’s narrator exhibits an empathic drive to metaphorise other minds that fits with Lee’s ideas, but also makes use of linguistic patterns that Hulme would understand as abstract, and therefore anti-empathic, to cultivate fellow feeling. A complementary reading of A Man Could Stand Up– focuses on empathy’s role in the representation of war, arguing that empathic experience mediated through abstraction becomes the only way to meet Ford’s impressionistic goal of rendering the effects of modern warfare on the mind.

Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s suggestion that contests between generations structure the literary field, this essay looks closely at Virginia Woolf’s attitudes to her older female contemporaries during the early part of her career, when as a newcomer she adopted a primarily agonistic relation to them. Her repudiation of such writers as Alice Meynell and Vernon Lee helped her to secure her own exceptional status. Yet once Woolf had achieved that status, she was more able to recognize her own implication in the competitive and hierarchical structures that constitute the literary field. By juxtaposing her public and private comments on Meynell and Lee from earlier and later in her career, we can register her subsequent re-valuation of at least some of the work of “the maternal generation.” As Woolf herself aged into an older generation, that is, she revisited her earlier judgments in a new spirit.

This conclusion draws together the three key authors of the study, considering how an examination of their work has illuminated a rich and complex form of sympathy. It suggests that these writers’ considerations of sympathy are entangled with the interest and pleasure of reading their work, and it concludes with a brief, speculative consideration of the relationship between reading, morality, and sympathy in their work.

The first case study to implement this way of reading takes Decadent poetry as its subject matter, with a particular focus on Arthur Symons (although with significant analysis also of Ernest Dowson, and reference to other Decadents including Lionel Johnson). It argues for a phenomenology of poetic form, made possible by the strict, regular, forms favoured by the aesthetes; and for a new mode of lyric encounter emerging from this. Comparing this with idealist and impressionist modes, it argues that this poetry ‘made for the eye’ was often made for an distinctly embodied eye—and that the Victorian association between the book and the body offered new possibilities for lyric when combined with a Decadent erotics.

The Conclusion focuses on the delicate balance between investment in Italy and disenchantment with the Risorgimento’s outcome in the period following official Italian unification in 1861. Late nineteenth-century writers like Henry James and Vernon Lee step back from Risorgimento politics to depoliticise Italy, returning it to the aesthetic domain; yet, an unsettling quality of resurgence, or risorgimento, lingers in the skeletal Juliana Bordereau of James’s ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888) and the revived corpse Medea da Carpi of Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ (1887/1890). George Meredith’s post-unification Vittoria (1866), in particular, points to the conflicts that the creation of an Italian nation-state failed to resolve; these contests, the Risorgimento’s cultural remains, reveal the centrality of loss, dissent and struggle to the Risorgimento’s legacy. However, Italian politics also played an invigorating, energising role for nineteenth-century British literature and culture, enlivening political discourse, cultural production and literary experimentation through its oppositionalist character.