The prolific author known as Vernon Lee occupies an unusual position in the intellectual history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Had she been male, her extensive albeit undisciplined scholarship, her keen sense of aesthetic appreciation, and her passionate desire to reform society would surely have won her an enduring place in any list of Victorian men of letters. But "Vernon Lee" was in fact Violet Paget, and when her identity became known in the early 1880s, she was acclaimed not as the last of the Victorian sages but as the first of the new type of professional woman writer. Critics in the periodical press greeted her as "a powerful mind ... an independent woman" of "gloriously lawless" opinions. Despite her intense fear of being influenced by others, Lee insisted that Walter Pater and Henry James served as her mentors. Her work was praised by Robert Browning...