Da Posthelthwaite al principe Alberico: Oscar Wilde visto da Vernon Lee.

Starting from the limited autobiographical and critical material available, as well as using the semi-fictional memories in the novel Miss Brown, my essay investigates the personal and creative relationship between Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde, two central figures of the Aesthetic Movement. Lee and Wilde met in 1881, during Lee’s first visit to England. Between these similar personalities a mixture of rivalry, mutual admiration and understanding soon arose. Lee immortalized that encounter in her letters and in the controversial roman à clef Miss Brown (1884), which annoyed many of her contemporaries, Wilde among them. Consequently, the two writers met on few other occasions, one of which in 1894 at il Palmerino, where Wilde accompanied Mary Costelloe (later Mrs Berenson) in the hope of seeing Lee’s brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton. With Wilde’s arrest in 1895 they lost contacts, nor did they meet after his release from prison, although it is possible to conjecture that Lee finally sided with him.