SOURCE: A review of Pope Jacynth and More Supernatural Tales, in The Canadian Forum, Vol. 36, 1956, p. 118.

In the following essay, the critic provides a mixed assessment of Lee's stories in Pope Jacynth and More Supernatural Tales.

Vernon Lee (Viola Paget, 1856-1935, a distinguished student of Italian art and literature), has no particular gift for the supernatural as such. Almost without exception, the most impressive literary ghost-stories deal with perversions of the power of the imagination to create life in the place of death—"Oh, who sits weeping upon my grave And will not let me sleep?" complains a typical victim of the living, and Cathy weeps at the window to which Heathcliff has dragged her. [In Lee's Pope Jacynth and More Supernatural Tales] the compulsive interplay between the quick and the dead is the theme of one of these stories, but it is crudely handled and the climax...