Vernon Lee: Transnational Activism and Protest Literature for Art and Peace

Vernon Lee (1856-1935) was a cosmopolitan British author who lived in Florence for most of her life and mainly wrote in English. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, she engaged in intercultural and transcultural discourses, both in her writings and actions, which took the form of participation in intellectual and civic initiatives of the Anglo-Florentine community. In 1898 she took action against the planned demolition of the medieval centre of Florence and voiced her dissent in the press, eventually involving a wide circle of international artists and intellectuals. This essay considers how, on that occasion, Lee adopted the ‘letter to the editor’ genre to raise both local and international awareness of the destruction of Italian cultural heritage. It also argues that the channels and rhetorical strategies she utilized to circulate her ideas would later be reactivated, becoming important in defining her role as a social agitator even outside Italy. During World War I, whilst living in England, Lee wrote other letters to the editor to support her pacifist campaigns. These texts re-enacted certain strategies of socio-political commitment which the author had experimented with in 1898. By doing so, she disseminated her positions well beyond her adopted country, while also paving the way for developments in her own work towards a much more elaborate, creative, and original form of protest literature.