Okay, good afternoon Shafkat Taohid. You're a Vernonly specialist and as such a founding
member of the International Vernonly Society, could you tell us how you first encountered
Vernonly and decided to research her work? Well, like many readers I first encountered
Vernonly through her short fiction and it was when I was a graduate student I was still
studying for my PhD. I wasn't working on Vernonly at the time but I read some of her short stories
and I was absolutely gripped and that led me to reading some of her essays and then to the
studies of the 18th century in Italy and to lots of other works and the thing I found
absolutely compelling is that all her books were different and she had this amazing capacity
in terms of subject, area and interests and I found her absolutely fascinating literary
character so I wanted to know more and more and I read more and more. You're an active
member of the Open University UK Red Project which collects data on the reading experience
in Britain from the 15th century to the 20th century. How does this project fit in with
your work on Vernonly? It's a perfect fit actually because Vernonly was a remarkable
reader. She kept extensive records of her reading in commonplace books, in her letters,
in the marginal notes, in the books that she owned. We're putting in some of that information
into the reading experience database but Vernonly's capacity for reading and responding to various
texts is quite astonishing and so it's sort of broadened our thinking about reading practices
at the time. This is the library of Vernonly given to the British Institute by her executrix
Irene Cooper Willis in 1935 so the library once lived at Villa Il Palmerino with Vernonly.
There are two major important things about this library, one that it shows the extraordinary
range of Vernonly's reading and the second is that she annotated her books, she spoke
to her books and scholars come here to read Vernonly's annotations. I'd like first of
all to give you an idea of the kinds of books, the nature of the books in the collection
and I'd like to read from Peter Gunn's list, the early biographer of Vernonly because he
gives us a very comprehensive list of her reading.
The subjects include works on geology, geography, biology, physiology, origins, physio-psychology
and pathology of sex, psychology, empirical and analytic, language, origins of signs and
symbols, expression, style, history, general and in relation to geography and climatology,
pre-history, economics, politics, especially socialism and Marxism, industrial relations,
the position of women, religion, philosophy, general, epistemology, logic, foundations
of science, ethics, aesthetics, studies of form, music. So in these 450 books with this
enormous range of a multidisciplinary reader, we can see the responses Vernonly made to
her books and I'd like to show you just a few examples of these. First of all, Vernonly
tended to keep a record of when she read books and whether she re-read books and she would
usually sign her, put her signature in the books, V-Paget, her real name, and the date
perhaps and address. In this particular case we don't have her address but often the address
is made with an embossed press. So we have Vernon V-Paget finished reading November
the 11th, 1907 and this is in Marshall's book, Pain, Pleasure and Aesthetics. The second
book I'd like to show you is Bergson's Mathieu Memoir because it is heavily, heavily annotated.
It gives a very good example of how much she was inclined to annotate books. Here you can
see she used pencil, purple crayon, she re-read the book in 1923 so she made a note that she'd
re-read it. She covers every little bit of space that she can and again during her reading.
Here for example she's slipped in a note rather than write it on the book and here we have
exclamation marks that she was very well known for in these books. The third one I'd like
to show you is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women in Economics. There are a number of Perkins
Gilman volumes in the collection. This particular one Vernon Lee reviewed in 1902. She has interestingly
an ink here rather than pencil at the beginning. She liked this page, admirable page she says
and again there's a fair amount of annotation throughout. Lastly I'd like to show you her
copy of Bernard Shaw's Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, heavily
annotated and with a marvellous annotation at the end of the volume. She says, but what
a fine book, how full of wisdom and humanity, only like every book, it requires a reader
to correct it. This is her annotation here at the end of the volume. Lastly I'd like
to give you an example of the experience of coming to read in Vernon Lee's library.
The scholar, Hilary Fraser, spent a month here. She read in our Room Overlooking the
Arnau, a number of books in the library and she wrote later, but as I sat in the heat
by the tall windows onto the river and watched the breeze fill the billowing white curtains,
it was as if the ghost of Vernon Lee herself, aficionado of hauntings as she was, had come
to sit with me there and go through her old books again. Her presence was palpable. Those
feisty marginal notes like her own ghostly imprint on the books that she read with such
passion and still haunts like an importunate shade. One doesn't have to be immersed in
Lee's own explorations of the psychophysiology of perception to be moved by the indentation
made by her pencil on the page when she writes, aha, or nonsense, or excellent, by a particularly
provocative point, or by finding a stray hair caught between the leaves and wondering if
it is hers before it is caught up by the wafting ghost breeze.
