Ethics and Empathy in the Literary Criticism of Vernon Lee

Abstract

Although Vernon Lee’s literary theories and critical methodologies altered radically over the course of her career, her interest in relationality and contact with otherness remained a constant. From the beginning her critical work is a compound of aesthetics and ethics; for Lee, ethical feeling is intimately bound up with the experience of empathy. A transitional figure between the moral criticism of the Victorians and the formalist criticism of early twentieth-century practitioners, Lee moved between and integrated aestheticism, moralism, and formalism into her own criticism, bringing to each of these methodologies a concern with relationality and ethics and a belief in the ennobling effects of reading. An analysis of Lee’s assessment of the beauty, morality, and form of the literary experience reveals that her underlying concern remained a belief in the ethical relevance of that experience. And even though, early and late in her career, Lee was drawn to critical practices that seem to bracket ethics, her criticism demonstrates the malleability of critical methodologies, exhibiting a capacity to open into concern for and engagement with alterity.