Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Ariadne in Mantua A Romance in Five Acts
    Ariadne in Mantua A Romance in Five Acts
    Ariadne in Mantua A Romance in Five Acts
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Ariadne in Mantua A Romance in Five Acts

    By Vernon Lee

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    Ariadne in Mantua A Romance in Five Acts
    Author

    Vernon Lee

    Vernon Lee (1856-1935) was the pen name of Violet Paget, a British author of supernatural fiction. Born in France to British expatriate parents, Paget spent most of her life in continental Europe. A committed feminist and pacifist, she joined the Union of Democratic Control during the First World War to express her opposition to British militarism. A lesbian, Paget had relationships with Mary Robinson, Amy Levy, and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson throughout her life. Paget, a dedicated follower of Walter Pater’s Aesthetic movement, lived for many years in Florence, where she gained a reputation as a leading scholar of the Italian Renaissance. In addition to her work in art history, Paget was a leading writer of short fiction featuring supernatural figures and themes. Among her best known works are Hauntings (1890), a collection of four chilling tales, and “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady,” a story which appeared in an 1895 issue of The Yellow Book, a controversial periodical that featured the works of Aubrey Beardsley, George Gissing, Henry James, and William Butler Yeats. Although Paget was largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, feminist scholars have rekindled attention in her pioneering work as a leading proponent of Aestheticism.

    Read more from Vernon Lee

    Related to Ariadne in Mantua A Romance in Five Acts

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Robert Thicknesse on Opera

      Apr 27, 2023

      I WAS AS EXCITED AS everyone else to learn that opera actually exists in New Zealand — two things surely linked before only by their joint gold for the world’s least fashionable phenomena. Not only that, but it turns out that Kiwis have a thriving ne

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Madness of Venice

      Apr 2, 2018

      1. I lived in Venice for two years, and I hated it. In conversations I used euphemisms and turns of phrase (among my favorite either you love it or hate it! and it’s a… difficult city), but I was lying through my teeth. I fucking hated it

      10 min read

    • Article

      Spell

      Apr 25, 2018

      Spell
      4 min read

    • Article

      La Otra Historia

      Jun 30, 2022

      La Otra Historia
      14 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jun 3, 2019

      A fancy for high green hills by a sea, baggy spacesin the day, a knack for gunpowder thinking,a library humming like a swarm of gnats; the intrigue of a woman with a pitch-perfect mind,blinking eyes whose silence is ancient and naked,a grave that is

      2 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 1, 2021

      The light from the full moon lent a silky, glacial sheen to the towering front of the cloud, which stretched off to the horizon in both directions. I stood transfixed as it made its way down the street toward me at a little over the town’s speed limi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Nov 3, 2022

      Shelf Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Sep 4, 2018

      In London. England. Who knows why?Perhaps this rumpled guyFrom central casting or a page of Dickens.He’s taking ordinary usTo haunts of the illustrious,Where even dull pulse quickens. A red felt hat’s dark fingered brim,Food-spotted vest are—him.A mo

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2021

      If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied. —Rudyard Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War,” The Years Between, 1919 She consulted me, a glance, and said: “I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let’s have somethi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Make A Spectacle Of Oneself

      Oct 27, 2022

      AWARE THAT QUEEN Elizabeth I said to Robert Cecil, a much greater man than I, “Little man, little man: must is not a word to be used to princes,” I am hesitant to address my new Sovereign Lord with the word “must”. But the Coronation must not be a se

      3 min read

    • Article

      The New Normal

      Oct 4, 2023

      The New Normal
      6 min read

    • Article

      Woman About Town

      Sep 29, 2022

      ONE MIGHT IMAGINE THAT most people would be rather flattered to find themselves described as “the chosen ones”, but not so the “international aesthetes” who according to a French magazine are injecting new life into Venice. Like all cosmopolitan citi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Singing Lessons

      Apr 28, 2022

      AS EVERYONE KNOWS, opera’s purpose is to convey — at irksome length — unwanted data about things like sex-worker healthcare in nineteenth-century Paris, the untaxing dilemmas of pre-Revolutionary grandees (boring afternoon: hmm, shoot stuff, or shag/

      3 min read

    • Article

      Studio

      Apr 1, 2022

      Studio
      3 min read

    • Article

      Robert Thicknesse on Opera

      May 25, 2023

      Robert Thicknesse on Opera
      3 min read

    • Article

      Stranger Than Fiction

      Apr 12, 2024

      Stranger Than Fiction
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Devil Strides Our Countryside

      Jan 26, 2023

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Jeremy Harte Reaktion Books 2022 Hb, 296pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781789146509 One of the most beloved of Doctor Who stories has long been 1971’s “The Daemons”. Over the cou

      15 min read

    • Article

      Circles Of The Damned

      Sep 1, 2021

      For centuries artists have mined Inferno for raw materials, but now in the sweltering days of the Anthropocene we are enacting it. The post Circles of the Damned appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2019

      “My arm is so brown and so beautiful,” is a thought I haveas I’m about to turn off the lamp and go to sleep.I look at it a moment in the soft glow, and see it, briefly,as though it belonged to someone else. A reddishkind of brown, like a toasted almo

      7 min read

    • Article

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • Article

      A Taxonomy of Longing

      Mar 1, 2020

      A Taxonomy of Longing
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Refusal To Mourn The Deaths, By Gunfire, Of Three Men In Brooklyn

      Jan 1, 2019

      And at times, didn’t the whole countrytry to break his skin?—Tim Seibles You strike your one good match to watch its bloomand jook, a swan song just before a nightwind comes to snuff it. That’s the kind of dayit’s been. Your Black & Mild, now, useles

      7 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 1, 2022

      Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. —Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” tr. by Clare C

      4 min read

    Reviews for Ariadne in Mantua A Romance in Five Acts

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Ariadne in Mantua A Romance in Five Acts - Vernon Lee

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ariadne in Mantua, by Vernon Lee

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: Ariadne in Mantua

      A Romance in Five Acts

      Author: Vernon Lee

      Release Date: August 23, 2011 [EBook #37169]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARIADNE IN MANTUA ***

      Produced by Andrea Ball, Christine Bell & Marc D'Hooghe

      at http://www.freeliterature.org (From images generously

      made available by the Internet Archive)

      ARIADNE IN MANTUA

      A ROMANCE IN FIVE ACTS

      BY

      VERNON LEE

      Portland, Maine

      THOMAS B. MOSHER

      MDCCCCXII

      TO

      ETHEL SMYTH

      THANKING, AND BEGGING, HER FOR MUSIC

      Contents

      Ariadne in Mantua, A Romance in Five Acts, by Vernon Lee. Oxford: B.H. Blackwell 50 and 51 Broad Street. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Company. A.D. MCMIII. Octavo. Pp. x: 11-66.

      Like almost everything else written by Vernon Lee there is to be found that insistent little touch which is her sign-manual when dealing with Italy or its makers of forgotten melodies. In other words, the music of her rhythmic prose is summed up in one poignant vocable—Forlorn.

      As for her vanished world of dear dead women and their lovers who are dust, we may indeed for a brief hour enter that enchanted atmosphere. Then a vapour arises as out of long lost lagoons, and, be it Venice or Mantua, we come to feel how deep an abyss separates us—and how many faint and nameless ghosts crowd round the few enduring things bequeathed to us by the past.

      T.B.M.

      PREFACE

      Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss

      It is in order to give others the pleasure of reading or re-reading a small masterpiece, that I mention the likelihood of the catastrophe of my Ariadne having been suggested by the late Mr. Shorthouse's Little Schoolmaster Mark; but I must ask forgiveness of my dear old friend, Madame Emile Duclaux (Mary Robinson), for unwarranted use of one of the songs of her Italian Garden.

      Readers of my own little volume Genius Loci may meanwhile recognise that I have been guilty of plagiarism towards myself also.[1]

      For a couple of years after writing those pages, the image of the Palace of Mantua and the lakes it steeps in, haunted my fancy with that peculiar insistency, as of the half-lapsed recollection of a name or date, which tells us that we know (if we could only remember!) what happened in a place. I let the matter rest. But, looking into my mind one day, I found that a certain song of the early seventeenth century—(not Monteverde's Lamento d'Arianna but an air, Amarilli, by Caccini, printed alongside in Parisotti's collection)—had entered that Palace of Mantua, and was, in some manner not easy to define, the musical shape of what must have happened there. And that, translated back into human personages, was the story I have set forth in the following little Drama.

      So much for the origin of Ariadne in Mantua, supposing any friend to be curious about it. What seems more interesting is my feeling, which grew upon me as I worked over and over the piece and its French translation, that these personages had an importance greater than that of their life and adventures, a meaning, if I may say so, a little sub specie aeternitatis. For, besides the real figures, there appeared to me vague shadows cast by them, as it were, on the vast spaces of life, and magnified far beyond those little puppets that I twitched. And I seem to feel here the struggle, eternal, necessary, between mere impulse, unreasoning and violent, but absolutely true to its aim; and all the moderating, the weighing and restraining influences of civilisation, with their idealism, their vacillation, but their final triumph over the mere forces of nature. These well-born people of Mantua, privileged beings wanting little because they have much, and able therefore to spend themselves in quite harmonious effort, must necessarily get the better of the poor gutter-born creature without whom, after all, one of them would have been dead and the others would have had no opening in life. Poor Diego acts magnanimously, being cornered; but he (or she) has not the delicacy, the dignity to melt into thin air with a mere lyric Metastasian Piangendo partè, and leave them to their untroubled conscience. He must needs assert himself, violently wrench at their heart-strings, give them a final stab, hand them over to endless remorse; briefly, commit that public and theatrical deed of suicide, splashing the murderous waters into the eyes of well-behaved wedding guests.

      Certainly neither the Duke, nor the Duchess Dowager, nor Hippolyta would have done this. But, on the other hand, they could calmly, coldly, kindly accept the self-sacrifice culminating in that suicide: well-bred people, faithful to their standards and forcing others, however unwilling, into their own conformity. Of course without them the world would be a den of thieves, a wilderness of wolves; for they are,—if I may call them by their less personal names,—Tradition, Discipline, Civilisation.

      On

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1