Linda Villari1

June 26, 1879 Oxford University, Bodleian Library Casa Bertagna, B di L. June 26. 79 My dear Madame Villari, I feel extremely touched and flattered at being told to write for your birthday, the more so as I am never quite free from the notion that my letters may be a bore. Being an egotistic animal my letters are myself, & I have a dread lest I be thrown aside, crumpled, crunched up & otherwise snubbed in the person of my letters. You ought not to have told me anything about my wonderful novel read in a vision, unless you could completely satisfy my curiosity on the subject. I am devoured by the desire to know what on earth it could have been about; a legitimate curiosity since I am its author. It is very odd that this matter completely bears out what I have repeatedly said to you (& always been fallen up2 for so saying) viz. that no creature will give a woman credit for serious (except scientific) writing; that everything like historical or critical work is sure to be set down as trash if from a female pen (for pens have a sex in this world). You deny my principle when you are awake but you endorse it when asleep: you are so very kind (when asleep, I dont know how it may be when you are bored awake) as to think that I shall some day write something fine; very good, and this something fine, what is it? a novel, that is exactly what you havent the smallest ground for supposing me able to write; now had I been a man you would have dreamt that the something fine was a volume of essays or so forth; but no, being a woman I am pursued by this horrible novel; pursued by it even into my friends dreams. Will you now admit that I am right in stating that no one, not even you, will believe in anything except a woman novelist? What it is to have a deaf man as a servant: this morning the maid solemnly announces to me Oggi deve arrivare la signorina di Piazza del Carmine3 Scene of astonishment; visitors of a recantation on Dr Wilsons part; say etc. Then doubts. Who told you that the Signorina di Piazza del Carmine was coming today? Ma stato Gigi4 Further astonishment; rapid mental investigations as to Gigis possible sources of information. But from whom has Luigi heard this? From the Signore What Signore? The Signor Padre Good gra-

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Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 18561935

cious! What can Papa know of Miss Sturgiss movements? Surely ... what did he say to Gigi? He said to Gigi to give him his breakfast an hour earlier because the Signorina di Piazza del Carmine was coming Enter Papa Papa what is it5 all about Miss Sturgis? Is she coming? Miss Sturgis? I dont know anything about Miss Sturgis But what did you say to Luigi this morning? about your breakfast? Papa, amazed, blank, stupefied , after a moments reflexion I told him that ass Luigi to bring me my tea earlier and to black my boots in time. Thats all I ever said. You see that deaf servants are provided by nature as a source of emotions to people who are in want of such. You know I suppose that Principal Tulloch (pronounced Tuller)6 represents a new era in Fraser: Mrs Brassey & a serial novel by Blackmore7 & a staff of special contributors. I doubt whether my series will suit now. Luckily it is very near the end, and I shd require merely to add Goldoni & Gozzi to complete the volume which I am determined to publish within a year from this. I doubt whether anyone will take the risk, as it is a necessary step I shall probably publish it myself; the three already published nos., Arcadi, Burney & Metastasio have alone given me upwards of a hundred & twenty pounds, which will pay amply for the publication. So that even if not a single copy sold (which I disbelieve) the book wd so to say, have published itself. And this is the plan I should think of adopting with future reprints. No sane publisher would make the venture; & publishers are always sane. Ellen Clerkes article (perhaps by the way you thought it was by Agnes, alias Edinbro Clerke)8 is very nicely written; indeed if anything too nicely. Some of the descriptions are very good & it is altogether very graceful; but it is sadly wanting in marrow; you have the uncomfortable feeling of reading about nothing at all, of unwinding numberless extremely elegant paper wrappers & finding only an empty little box at the end, as certain evil minded people made a poor M. de Mormart do at Nice for Aprils day: they sent him a large box at the custom house, which being opened & a thousand such wrappers having been removed with feverish fingers, at length disclosed only a caricature of the old gentleman himself as a fox in a mackintosh. Ellen Clerke did well so far; but had she had that faith in my friendship which I have in other peoples & desire them to have in mine, she might, by merely mentioning the project to me, have got a good number of very curious facts about the life & ideas of these peasants, which I picked up last year while hearing fairy tales from them. A certain barrier of distrust & reticence I have always felt between the Clerkes9 & me, which I have vainly tried to break down in five years intimacy; a barrier which, pardon my saying so, I have never felt between you & myself. I am curious to know what could have induced Gina to carry Paris & Helena10 in a handrag to Vallombrosa, unless the hope of performing the part thereof to

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the musical ghosts of Milton11 & of Vathek Beckford of Fonthill12 who may be supposed occasionally to haunt that place. Anyhow I feel flattered at the action; and I assure you the battered copy wd have pleased me more for such vigorous song. I care for the inside of music books exclusively; and being avaricious by nature, feel irritated at every waste of money, be it my own or other peoples. Another time pray restore to me my battered property. Pray give my best thanks to Prof. Villari for his very interesting report & for the flattering idea and sending it to me. Give my very best love to Miss Sturgis; & if she ask my news, & show readiness to read my handwriting, perhaps also hand this scribble to her. If she were here, I shd certainly try & get hold of your letters to her. With united best greetings to all your party, I remain Very sincerely yours Violet Paget What can [I] say about your birthday except that I am extremely glad you were born?
1. See List of Correspondents: Linda Villari. 2. fallen up: [fallen upon] 3. The young lady from Piazza del Carmine should arrive today. 4. Gigi did 5. it: [this] 6. John Tulloch (1823-1886) took editorship of Frasers Magazine in 1879 and held the post for a year in a half. In his lectures and studies, he was chiefly interested in university reform, church defense, Scottish and Reformation history and promoted theological liberalism. 7. Anna Brassey (1839-1887) was a travel writer and charity campaigner. She wrote about the English countryside, traveling at sea, and botany. Her most popular book was A Voyage in the Sunbeam Our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months (1878). Richard Doddridge Blackmore (1825-1900) was an author of several novels, including the popular Lorna Doone (1870). Some of his novels were serialized, but most appeared in book form in three volumes. 8. VL may be implying that LV thought the article was by Ellens sister, Agnes Clerke, who was published in the Edinburgh Review. Agnes was the better-known author of the two sisters and LV may have been unaware that Ellen was a published author as well. 9. See VL to LV, September 1878, ftn.7. 10. Paris and Helena: Opera in Five Acts, by Christoph Willibald Gluck. VLs copy was likely in German or Italian. 11. See Natheless he so endured, till on the beach / Of that enflamd sea, he stood and called / His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced / Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks / In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades / High overarched imbower (Paradise Lost, Book 1: 299-304). 12. Travel writer William Beckfords home and grand architectural experiment was Fonthill Abbey in Bath. He spent a fortune building it from ruins, but it collapsed in 1825. VL alludes here to Beckfords most popular book, the gothic story Vathek, An Arabian Tale (1782). Beckford himself travelled extensively throughout southern Europe, in Italy, Spain and especially Portugal. See VL to CT, February 18, 1873.

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Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 18561935

Karl Pearson1
March 13, [1886] University College London archives 5 Via Garibaldi Florence March 13. Dear Sir, I dont know whether I owe to Mr Unwins initiative, or perhaps to a more welcome impulse of your own, the pleasure which I have received from your book.2 I had previously asked Mr Cotton3 to let me review it; but finding that it took for granted far greater knowledge than I possess, I begged Mr Cotton to transfer the reviewing to a more competent person. I do not, however, wish to deprive myself of the satisfaction of letting you know how very greatly I like your book; and a letter gives me the opportunity of asking you also for some further explanations on some of the subjects that you treat of. I am extremely glad that you have proclaimed the necessity of intellectual responsibility in a moment when the exaggerated sense of moral responsibility may drive many people into mere useless or harmful talk or action. I think you certainly tend to undervalue what you call the man of the marketplace: he is a necessary part of all progress, the burning glass without which no spark could be obtained. He is also useful, even in his lowest form, inasmuch as he forcibly draws the attention of students onto subjects which, apart from their actuality, have no greater charm than any other. I cannot but think that in this sense all the absurdities even of red hot socialists will be useful; and on the other hand almost harmless, if the men of the study, and the public in general, could awaken to their full intellectual responsibility. I venture to disagree with you in your evident aversion to proselytism. I think that you are right in trying to check all propaganda in favour of action which would be probably rash & useless; but you are surely wrong in wishing to check the propaganda of thought & feeling. To my mind we must work, incessantly, not upon institutions but upon minds, our own & our neighbours. We must not despoil ourselves of our intellectual privileges the privileges of comparative freedom from want, of leisure, of education, of acquired subtlety of sentiment but employ them for the benefit of others, until they shall cease to be privileges, not because the minority has lost, but because the majority has gained. This rather oldfashioned view has somewhat shocked my more socialistic friends; I trust it will not shock you. I have rather rambled from my original point. I wanted to say that it seems to me that you undervalue in a most extraordinary way the necessity of undermining orthodox religious belief. You must evidently have lived in a charmed circle of agnostics to speak with such contempt

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of those who still cling to traditional beliefs and of those who attempt to detach them from these beliefs. My daily increasing experience tends, on the contrary, to show me how great is still the hold of every kind of superstition upon some of the most valuable minds of characters among ones friends. I belong myself to a family which has been Voltairian for more than a hundred years, to the great scandal of all neighbours; and having been brought up in deistic views, & among the small number of persons whom deistic views did not utterly madden some twenty years ago (what a change in these twenty years!) I consider that my opinion has value when I protest that religious faith is still rife among some of the most valuable members of the community, whose value it is forever diminishing by hampering their ideas or diverting their energies into useless channels. How is it possible, for instance, that a real believer, brought up in the notion of cut & dried rules of conduct & of the mere sanction of Gods caprice, should understand, or be otherwise than revolted by, your very suggestive papers on the position of women? Let us therefore proselytise; and recognising all that is valuable, stimulating & consoling in orthodox religion, attempt to get rid of the rubbish with which it is mixed up. I am very much struck by your papers on the woman question.4 I read one of them last year, & I must admit to my shame, that it was one of the first things that drew my attention to that question, which the exceptional good fortune of my life had lead me to despise.5 You are perfectly right in insisting upon the discussion of subjects upon which so much of the future happiness of the world depends; and upon which the universal ignorance is equal only to the universal indecent prudery. I cannot but think that a great step will be gained by women becoming doctors: it will familiarise women with certain questions which they have utterly blinked [at], and it will bring to the fore a mass of information which very natural repugnances have hitherto kept back. The student of the woman question ought to be a woman: it is only then that we can get rid of that hideous french legend of La Femme, that is to say of a sort of diseased [fe]male, as expounded by Dumas fils, by Michelet and even by french men of science.6 Will you allow me to say that, for the moment, I feel a great aversion to certain resolutions of the population question which you have not actually recommended, but at all events not blamed? I am herein very much opposed to my friend Miss Clapperton.7 To her, & to you perhaps, I seem a retrograde & a sentimentalist. But I8 plead guilty to extreme conservation whenever it is a question of roughly touching certain instinctive repugnances of our nature. They may be wrong; but on the whole they are more likely, to be correct, and we should treat them carefully & reverently, even if we eventually decide against them. To me the instinctive aversion of English men & women against those practises which are rife in France seems a correct & holy one: we must not9 buy temporary peace from an economic difficulty at the price of discouraging, instead of encouraging,

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such moral self-restraint as is, if not practised, at least theoretically admitted. Your own remarks about Luthers attitude on the marriage question seem to me very suggestive when applied to the question of neo-malthusism.10 It is not one of mere bodily health, nor of increase of numbers. The 70 give an instinct therein by removing the11 responsibilities naturally attached to it is surely an immoral thing. It is to track people that they may eat their cake & keep it; and, despite the enormous advantage which such methods offer in disposing of certain economic problems, I cannot but consider them as akin to the practises of that Roman emperor and those Renaissance cardinals, who found12 out a simple means of eating as many dinners as they liked. Such practices seem to me to bring us fearfully onto the brink of unnatural horrors of all kinds; and I cannot but remark that the people (the upper classes here, for instance) who13 use them, are steeped in a corruption of which only a very small section of our English well to do people can have an idea. Surely chastity is a virtue not merely because it prevents the earth from being over populated (or under populated, as the case may be) but because it leaves the mind freer for such feelings and enjoyments as can further, and cannot do anything except further, the happiness of the world at large. Do not, above all, let us sell our birthright of moral instincts & repugnances for the dregs of pottage of an immediate & easy solution of certain problems: we shall merely be as hungry again tomorrow, and considerably poorer into the bargain. This same consideration leads me to ask how you square yr theories about the man of the study with the rather aggressive & uncompromising socialism of some of your essays. I have been reading Pol. Econ. and socialism now for two years; and, although I carefully refrain from making up my mind one way or another, I see that, for the moment at least, I am tending towards the orthodox school. I feel, as strongly as anyone, the desirability & necessity of an eventual rearrangement of all social things; but I cannot believe in any deliberate and artificial rearrangement of them. Above all, I cannot see my way to believing in the virtues of state interference, or the hampering of individual liberty: any socialism, any large cooperation, it seems to me at present, must be a result of individual effort & struggle, not a means of suppressing all such. Above all, I cannot see how, in our present condition of irresponsibility & ignorance we can legislate except with the very worst results. Am I not more faithful to yr ideal of the man of the study than you yourself ? Are you not, in yr chapters on socialism, a man of the market place, trying to hound on others instead of trying to understand & make others understand? Pray forgive the freedom of this criticism: you will understand that it is due to the great interest I have taken in your book. I am young, & anxious to study such questions; anxious, particularly, to do as little mischief as possible to my own mind and the actions of others. Will you take my remarks as coming from a person with infinitely less knowledge & means of knowledge (a person biased

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by other studies & bound in a measure to an artificial & frivolous life), but who wishes to understand & judge fairly? There are so few who wish really & honestly & patiently to do their best, that those who do have a certain claim on one anothers sympathy & assistance. Pray believe me Yours faithfully V. Paget (Vernon Lee)
1. See List of Correspondents: Karl Pearson. 2. This is either Matter and Soul (1886) or Enthusiasm of the market place and of the study (1885) [investigate further] 3. J. S. Cotton (1869-1916), editor of the Academy 4. Pearsons writings on eugenics and socialism also addressed the woman question; however, Pearson advocated that the primary role of a woman was to propagate the race. VLs disagreement with Pearson stems from her defense of a womens choice of chastity. 5. VLs only published writing on this subject was Economic Dependence of Women, North American, 175 (July 1902); rpt. in Gospels of Anarchy (1908). 6. VL later makes the point in Economic Dependence of Women that women are first and foremost human, and therefore share universal human faculties with men, and that the idea of the traditional female is a male construction. 7. Jane Hume Clapperton (1832-1914) was a social reformer and activist for the suffrage movement. Her politics and suggestions for social reform were progressive, in that she advocated utopian communities and greater freedom in sexual relations. Her book Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness (1885) expounded these beliefs and was widely read at the time. 8. admit to extreme 9. not: IA 10. Pertaining to the doctrine of T. R. Malthus (1766-1834) on population control: that the rate of increase of the population tends to be out of proportion to the increase of its means of subsistence and should be checked, for instance, by sexual restraint. 11. natural 12. that they couldnt 13. practise

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Bernard Berenson1

September 2, 1897 Villa I Tatti: Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Letterhead: Il Palmerino, Maiano Florence La Fert sous Jouarre Sept 2. 1897 Dear Mr Berenson, I feel obliged, after some days of repugnance, to take notice of certain statements and implications contained in your ostensibly very friendly & courteous letter; lest you should, perchance, misinterpret my silence as much as I still hope I may be misapprehending your words.2

Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 18561935

First let me thank you for all the fine things you say about my powers of expression.3 They are the more welcome because, as three quarters of the essay are written, with scarcely a word of alteration, by Miss Anstruther Thomson, it would appear that she participates in a quality which you find rarer than I do. As regards the novelty of the subject matter, my position throughout this essay (& in my review also of your book in Mind)4 is precisely that the progress of criticism & psychology must inevitably suggest such views & thoughts as ours & apparently yours; so that I find myself amply confirmed by your assurance that they are quite familiar to yourself and other initiated persons. I might indeed think that the expression you employ viz: hackneyed savours of exaggeration;5 & I might regret that your sense of their being hackneyed prevented your including them in any of your own books; if I thought your vein of sarcastic innuendo at all suitable to this occasion. For the plain English of your elaborate ambiguities about perfect distillations of numerous conversations etc, about a recording angel who stores up nothing against one but takes the whole burden on his (read her) shoulders etc. about the divine gift of utterance to which insight, experience, thought etc (i.e. those of a 3rd person) are only the purveyors, & finally about that absence of consciousness, even under its ethical aspect of conscience which you connect with the possession of this gift of utterance thus attributed to my friend & myselfthe plain English of all this equivocating sarcasm is: that Miss Anstruther Thomson & I have stolen the larger part of our essay from your conversation. I set it down in all its crudeness, because I believe that whatever mean & absurd things your tendency to exaggeration & your pleasure in complicated utterances may have hurried you into writing, you will nevertheless recoil from acknowledging that a thought so ludicrous & so detestable ever seriously formulated itself in your mind. Ever since your letter arrived, I have been trying to get over my disgust & indignation & trying to understand by what extraordinary combination of superficial reading, of confused memory & of rash & violent expression you can have written a statement so untenable and so slanderous. Thus, as regards our conversations on aesthetics (which came to an end with6 my reading you some notes on the proof sheets of Tuscan Painters) & those which you had in previous years with Miss Thomson in the galleries, I expect that you utterly confuse them with conversations you have had with other persons later & when your own ideas had evolved into much greater resemblance with ours than would appear from your books & than either Miss Thomson or I have any recollection of. For I remember perfectly not only my conversations with you, but those which Miss Thomsons splendid memory enabled her to repeat to me; & in neither can I find the theory exposed in7 our article, nor anything like the twelve or fifteen experiments detailed therein, or like the

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illustrations, obiterdicta & instances to which you refer. But, on the contrary, a much greater amount of dissimilarity in all detail views than the fact that we were both of us looking for the secret of aesthetics in the same direction & with the same methods would have led me to suppose. Indeed I always went against the fears of Miss Thomson lest you should let out discoveries similar to her own, & oblige her thereby to communicate her own views before they were matured by sufficient experiment & comparison. Nay, one of8 my motives in writing that article in Mind, besides the desire that your services to psychology should be apprehended according to their priority, was the wish to have summed up your views before publishing those embodied in Miss Thomsons & my notebooks, so as to clear either party from any suspicion of plagiarism on the part of the public, by showing exactly how much of your views we then knew of, & how little we agreed in them. For the same reason I read you some elaborate MS. criticisms. The appearance of Tuscan Painters decided us not to place our ideas before you before their publication, because the difference between them & your own seemed too great to render an interchange in the least useful to either party, while it might have been extremely disconcerting to one of them. You see by the details I have given you of Miss Thomsons & my work, & the explanation I am trying to find for your obvious confusion of meum & tuum,9 that I as yet decline to hold you responsible for the charge of wholesale robbery which constitutes the jist10 of your letter; a charge which, had you seriously & deliberately maintained, your own manliness & good sense would have couched in the form of a straightforward & specified statement, rather than in semijocular ambiguities. I have the greatest admiration (I have shown it in writing twice about you, & in helping you in your tongue tied days) for your talents;11 I have felt real gratitude for your kindness towards my brother & that generous helpfulness towards Miss Thomson of which, alas! you are now spoiling the savour. Moreover, I am sincerely attached to yr friend Mrs Costelloe, & have been glad to find that some of my best friends are among yours;12 all of which circumstances make me extremely anxious to find that you did not mean to commit the offence of which your pen has been guilty. I shall therefore mention this matter to none of our common friends unless you force me to. For these reasons also, but still more because in her present condition of health & with her unflinching & unforgiving sense of honour the bare thought of the writer of such a letter as a near neighbour would make Florence disagreeable to her, for all these reasons I have communicated to Miss Thomson neither your letter nor its real character. So the matter rests between you & me. I ask for no explanation or apologies on yr part, holding such things as useless; & I am writing, to forget, if I can, this lamentable manifestation on you part. Only, should you feel inclined to repeat any of these accusations viva voce to our common friends, I shall trust to the consciousness &

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conscience on wh: you pride yourself, to accompany such accusations by a sight (to others) of this present letter, & to myself by a specified account of at least some of the alleged plagiarisms. I have the greatest aversion to such correspondences as your letter & my answer sometimes lead to; & I therefore request that there may be nothing of the sort. Whatever the attitude you assume, I trust we may neither of us bore or amuse our acquaintance with any unusual behaviour. Meanwhile I hope I may be justified in still signing myself Your friend V. Paget You give no Engadine address so I must send this to Haslemere.
1. A draft of this letter is in VLA, dated September 2, 1897. It is a preliminary to this sent letter, in that the content is the same except the draft contains some whole sections crossed out and scattered word substitutions. A transcription of this letter is also included in The Selected Letters of Bernard Berenson, edited by A.K. McComb (1964) (hereafter, SLBB) 2. BBs original letter of accusation, dated August 24, 1897 is in the archives at Villa I Tatti and transcribed in SLBB. 3. BB facetiously referred to VLs original ideas in her article: But it is yr. gift of putting things freshly, with all the illusion of lucidity that I envy. What is insight, experience, thought compared to it? All these & myriads of other qualities are but purveyors to the divine gift of utterance. And yet I console myself, perceiving one fatal drawback to this gift. It is so frequently accompanied by unconsciousness; & to people of my stamp, consciousness in every form, even under its ethical aspect of conscience is after all the one humanizing thingthat which distinguishes man from the brutes on the one hand, & the gods on the other. (SLBB 55-56) 4. A Review of Florentine Painters of the Renaissance by Bernard Berenson. Mind 2 (1896): 270-72. VL uses the review to introduce BBs theories to an audience of psychologists and to separate her ideas from his: The subject of aesthetics, of the how and why of the perceptive and emotional phenomena connected with art and the Beautiful, is one which has occupied my own thought for many years, and upon which, in consequence, I have myself arrived at a certain number of conclusions. With these conclusions the facts and theories propounded by Mr Berenson by no means tally either as whole or parts; but such differences however considerable, are thrown into the shade by my thorough agreement with the method and the spirit which Mr Berenson has applied to aesthetic problems. (270) 5. But with your instances, examples & obiter dicta I am simply delighted. They are such familiar, cherished friends. Perhaps I was just beginning to take them too much as a matter of course, as something for the few initiated, already hackneyed & you make me appreciate them afresh. How can I sufficiently thank you! (SLBB 55) 6. the publication of 7. my 8. our 9. mine and thine; illustrates the principle of sole rights to some thing or idea: What is mine is mine, what is yours is yours. 10. jist (gist): a word that VL misspells elsewhere. I have maintained it because I silently correct only anomalous, uncommon spelling errors. 11. See VL to BB January 8 and 25, 1894. 12. They had several Italian, English, and American acquaintances in common including Gabriele dAnnunzio, Harry Brewster, Elena French, Henry James, Countess Maria Pasolini, Carlo Placci, Logan Pearsall Smith, and Edith Wharton.

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H.G. Wells
December 22, 1909 Colby College, Miller Library1 Dec. 22. Il Palmerino San Gervasio Florence Dear Mr Wells, I have asked your friends to lunch & hope to see them someday soon about your letter.2 I hesitate what to say, or to say anything. Yet silence or evasion seems disrespectful to its unflinching frankness. I have been turning the matter round & round in my thoughts, hoping, wishing, to find at last a point of view from which I could find it all right. But I find that I always revert back to the same position which is the only one that is natural to me. The story is easy to understand, easy to sympathise with, even easy to excuse; it is familiar, the same as or related to so many which one knows or guesses. But it seems to belong to the past & to the present which is a bit of the past, & I am unable to translate it into such terms as would stand in a deliberately or at least courageously turned over page of the future. It jars moreover in its details with some of the notions deepest ingrained in me. My experience as a woman and a friend of women persuades me that a girl, however much she may have read and thought & talked, however willing she may think herself to assume certain responsibilities, cannot know what she is about as a married or older woman would, & that the unwritten code is right when it considers that an experienced man owes her protection from himself from herself This point of view of mine nothing can change, & I believe that a change upon this point means not progress in our standard, but lapse such as has always been & occasionally always must be. I have a feeling also, though there is much to be said on the other side, that laws should be broken deliberately, at least openly At all events what grieves me is not that those who have eaten the cake & drunk the wine should pay the price of it, but that part of the price should be paid by others who have not had their share. In all this story the really interesting person seems to me to be your wife, and it is her future, her happiness for which I am concerned. And I cannot help thinking also of the damage which this baseness has done to utopias & utopians; above all, of the recrudescence of prejudice and horrid suspiciousness which will come in the way of the possible comradeship of so many men & girls.

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There! Thats what my judgement, do what I will, always returns to; and to hide it would poison all the friendship we may, I hope and, wish still have. But while it is right you should know how I feel, I want you to know at the same time that I have not really lost my trust in you. Your books even many passages of Veronica Ann3 about furtiveness e.g. have inspired me with respect and liking greater than that for any living writer; and I shall therefore continue to hope and even in a way to believe that impossible though it be for you to show or for me to see, there yet remains an explanation of all this matter which both the point of view and the actual facts - may be worthy of what I have imagined you to and am still willing to give you credit for. As I write these things they sound presumptuous and self-righteous. But one thing you and I do, I feel sure, agree upon, namely, that although those who are not tempted cannot judge of the difficulty of resisting; those on the other hand, who are tempted, cannot judge of the need which the community has of demanding that temptation should be resisted. It is possible that this crude & perhaps prejudiced criticism may put an end to your side of our friendship. Should this be the case, it will not alter mine. I shall always remain your sister in utopia;4 and so long as both of you wish it, your and your wifes affectionate friend. I shall of course try to avoid all discussion of your concerns with others; whatever I am forced to say (as little as possible) will be in the spirit of what I have said to you.
1. This is labelled Exact Copy by Evelyn Wimbush. The original is not in the Wells archive at the University of Illinois Library Archives. 2. HW wrote to VL in September 1909 about the scandal concerning his wife, Jane Wells, and his lover, Amber Reeves. Reeves was about to bear him a child and he was trying to decide whether he should leave his wife for Reeves. (Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, H.G. Wells, A Biography, [1973], p. 255) 3. Ann Veronica (1909) See VL to HW, January 19, 1910. 4. See A Modern Utopia by Wells (1905). HW addressed VL in his letters as his sister in utopia.

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H.G. Wells

January 19, 19101 University of Illinois Library Archives Letterhead: Il Palmerino, San Gervasio, Florence Jan 19. 1910 Dear Mr Wells, dear friend I dont know exactly what it is I want to write, except that what I wrote last represented only one half of me and represented it in a cut-&-dry, crude, pedantic, self-righteous form. I do think all that. But I think and feel also that you are one of the greatest and dearest of living persons,

Letters 18791926 13

and that your books, even your worst, are far above the best thought & will of those who fall foul of them. And, dear Mr Wells, since I speak of falling foul (and in the literal sense foul)2 of your books, I want to say again, and after oh such sickening discussions of Ann Veronica, that you must not give all of us who are faithful to you the misery of the discussions which will ensue if at this moment you write more things that can be connected with your personality, or interpreted in the light of your own case:3 Everyone mis-states the story of Ann Veronica in terms of your own universally known story. My love to your wife and believe me Yours always V. Paget P.S. If you have a book dealing with love etc ready, hold it back till it can be read for what it is, people will forget, if you dont remind them. I am not counselling cowardice. If I thought people could follow your reasons and arguments, I should say write it all out boldly and state your case directly. But anything you write now will be merely skimmed as a text for dirty puritan comment. Very intelligent people have told me e.g. that Ann V. was stealing another womans man and that Capes was exactly like the same as Ramage!4 There is a run on the book for its psychological interest.
1. A draft of this letter, dated January 19 and labelled Exact Copy is in VLA. 2. VL distinguishes between fall foul of: quarrel with, or make an attack on (foul adv., def. 6); and foul: not clean, or wholesome; dirty, or soiled (foul adj., def. 1and 2). 3. Ann Veronica became a lightning rod for moralists to denounce the filth they perceived in modern literature, e.g., female characters who lived and loved freely. The Spectator led the charge against HW in a review that labelled the book poisonous. (Mackenzie, p. 256) 4. Ramage and Capes are male characters in the novel, and lovers of Ann Veronica. Ramage is a cad, but Capes is honest and morally righteous in his act of leaving his wife for Ann Veronica. It is a defense of unions that are based on love, intellectual and spiritual partnerships, rather than marriages based on social convention.

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Bella Duffy1

February 3, 1926 Colby College, Miller Library Envelope: Inghilterra, Miss Duffy, 36 Fitzjames Avenue, West Kensington, London W. Feb. 3. XXVI Very dearest Bella, Perhaps your doctor has made a mistake. Anyhow, whether you go before or after me, your words of loving farewell make (& will make) all the difference

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Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 18561935

to what remains of my life.2 And though I3 cant bear the thought of your protracted suffering, I wish you might read these thanks. But you know what you have been all through my life, more than ever these last years. And if I survive you I shall do so in almost utter intellectual solitude. I will obey your instructions about your former maid. Dear, dearest friend, thanks, loving loving thanks. Your life has always seemed to me more generous & heroic than any other I have known. I wish I could have told you so. I wish we could have gone hand in hand. Yrs V4
1. See List of Correspondents: Bella Duffy. 2. to what remains of my life: IA 3. dont 4. In VLs handwriting on a page attached to the letter is written returned unopened by the Agent.

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