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    ‘Feelings of Vivid Fellowship’: Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson’s Quest for Collaborative ‘Aesthetic Sociability’

    Bunting, K (2016) ‘Feelings of Vivid Fellowship’: Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson’s Quest for Collaborative ‘Aesthetic Sociability’. Forum For Modern Language Studies, 52 (2). pp. 203-217. ISSN 1471-6860

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    Abstract

    The article provides an analysis of the shared life writing of Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, with particular reference to the writing of ‘Beauty and Ugliness’. The essay investigates how the authors’ already precarious subjectivities as women working in the male-dominated scientific and aesthetic fields of the 1890s were brought under further stress by Lee’s compulsive need for increased strength through union with another, her scepticism about her own abilities as ‘motor-type’ aesthete, and the collaborators’ unequal investigative and textual methodology. By analysing Lee’s semi-autobiographical depictions of her work with Anstruther-Thomson in Althea and focusing in particular on the pair’s one successful experiment in the search for ‘aesthetic sociability’ in front of Titian’s ‘Sacred and Profane Love’, this essay charts the development of their shared lives and writing from their first meeting, to the ecstatic pinnacle of their joint achievement, before examining the collapse of their collaborative dyad.

    Item Type: Article
    Peer-reviewed: Yes
    Date Deposited: 20 Jan 2017 08:54
    Publisher: Oxford University Press
    Additional Information: This is an author accepted manuscript of a paper accepted for publication in Forum For Modern Language Studies, published by and copyright Oxford University Press.
    Divisions: Faculties > Arts and Humanities
    Research Centres > Creative Writing, English Literature and Linguistics
    Subject terms: Keywords: physiological aesthetics; psychological aesthetics; collaboration;Vernon Lee; Clementina Anstruther-Thomson; life-writing, 2002 Cultural Studies, 2005 Literary Studies
    URI: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/617767
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqw005
    ISSN 1471-6860

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