Vernon Lee’s Composition of ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’: Historic Emotion and the Aesthetic Life

This article examines Vernon Lee’s personal impressions of the people, landscapes, architecture, and religious art she encountered while travelling in Tangier and Southern Spain in the winter of 1888 and 1889 as recorded in her Commonplace Book iv . In doing so, it contextualizes the composition of Lee’s only supernatural tale set in Spain, ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’, written in the summer of 1889, and in the wake of a painful period for Lee — intimacy with her companion of eight years, A. Mary F. Robinson, abruptly ended between 1887 and 1888 after Robinson’s unexpected marriage. With an eye to biographical context, this article also marks a return to Lee’s aesthetic theories of the 1880s, usually overshadowed by critical interest in her later theory of ‘aesthetic empathy’ informed by her study of psychological aesthetics. By tracing Lee’s views of the mind in the 1880s as inherently rooted in sympathetic impulses of association — what Lee terms the ‘faculty of association’ — this piece explicates her early aesthetic theories of the ‘aesthetic life’ and ‘historic emotion’, and demonstrates how she used her period of exposure to foreign, and at times unsettling climes and cultures, to experiment with the benefits and limitations of (aesthetic) sympathy in encounters with difference.