The Archival Traces of Desire: Vernon Lee's Failed Sexuality and the Interpretation of Letters in Lesbian History

Abstract

Newman investigates what happens when researchers do not find what they are looking for, and describes her growing boredom as days and weeks of reading sentimental correspondence failed to yield evidence about the nature of English novelist Vernon Lee's intimate relationships with other women. She further demonstrates that both her boredom and the judgment of "failed lesbianism" stem from inadequate attention to the specificity of researchers' desire for evidence about the "lesbian" nature of the desire recorded in love letters. She concludes that the core methodological problem confronting lesbian history may not be the recovery of lost or suppressed evidence as much as the expectation that researchers will know how to recognize the "ambiguous textual traces of desire" that are right in front of them.

MY INTEREST IN VERNON LEE ( 1856-1935) grew out of a project on the use of code by women who did not want to use sexological or psychological terms to describe their love for other women.1 After reading Phyllis Mannocchi's article about the extensive correspondence between Vernon Lee and Clementina ("Kit") Anstruther-Thomson that, she hinted, contained such a code, I was hooked. But perhaps I should also have paid heed to Rosemarie Bodenheimer, who, in her discussion of George Eliot's letters, asked the following questions: "What do we look for in letters? What do we do with them?"2 These questions came back to haunt me in their starkest form during my research in Vernon Lee's papers at Colby College. What happens when you don't find what you are looking for? And what was I now to do with what I had found? This article traces that journey. In the first part I track the evolving narratives that have shaped Vernon Lee's profile in the public and scholarly domain and that have been influential in promoting a particular mythology about Lee's "failed sexuality." In the second I turn to the archive itself to look for the textual traces of Lee's relationships with Kit Anstruther-Thomson and Mary Robinson (better known from her published work as Mary Duclaux), two women who have been constructed as her primary loves.3 As I will discuss throughout this essay, the practice of reading holograph manuscripts is a process that involves the scholar as an interpreter of textual material, and, as such, she or he is intimately implicated in the construction of meaning and knowledge.

In 1904, several years after the break with her intimate friend "Kit" Anstruther-Thomson, Vernon Lee revisited her friend's family home in Scotland and wrote to her in remembrance of things long past:

Coming from Thornton the day before yesterday I felt I was travelling, with such an odd, vague yet poignant expectancy into my own past. . . . At Kilconquhar you came to fetch me, now just seventeen years ago, the first time I came to Charleton; you had a beret deep over your head, & we picked up an old lady's blue hat box, somewhere near the big willows on the road. And at Largo, on the pier, they were dancing, that evening (there was a fire balloon & we took it for the moon) on which, coming home, I got the news that the first great friendship and love of my life had come to an end; that evening when the little white rose on my pillow told me that a new, greater, eternal (I think, dear Kit!) one had begun.4

Before I had even begun my research in Vernon Lee's archive, the image of that white rose was in my mind from Phyllis Mannocchi's lovingly detailed description of its material existence in the archive: "The symbol of their romantic friendship and intellectual partnership, chosen by the two women themselves, is a small pressed rose, preserved in an envelope, then tucked among a sheaf of letters written by Vernon to Kit during 1887 and 1888. On the envelope, Vernon has written 'Kit/Charleton Aug 24/Neue Liebe, Neues Leben [New Love, New Life].'"5 Since I wanted to see the rose, it was among the first items I requested when I set foot in the Miller Reading Room at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. I was devastated when the curator told me it could not be found.6 I became fixated on viewing the rose and during the weeks of my research repeatedly asked the curator, "Have you found it?" What is it about the image of the rose that was so intriguing? Is it that the rose is a tangible object that can stand in for something that cannot otherwise be pinned down-the ambiguous textual traces of desire? Certainly, it is emblematic of the difficulties that a lesbian historian faces in the pursuit of that "obscure object of desire."7

What is desire, and how do we recognize its textual traces? Is it possible to "prove" lesbian existence, desire, or behavior through archival material, and what will count as "evidence" in this form of historical research? As Fredric Jameson argues, we should see "sexuality not as an autonomous phenomenon, with some fundamental phenomenological meaning of its own, but rather as a phenomenon that must always mean something, even though the meaning is always constructed after the fact, and in the service of a host or system of other meanings; and which must always somehow conjoin with another, equally unstable and un-predetermined phenomenon, in order to take on the appearance of a fact as such."8

The notion of "fact" or evidence is an issue that is fraught with theoretical and definitional uncertainty in lesbian historiography. As lesbian theorist Annamarie Jagose observes, there is a "persistent configuration of the lesbian as an epistemological opacity."9 However, this opacity reflects the issues that arise when one attempts to locate any sexual identity in historical context and is not exclusive to lesbian identity. Because the assumption of heterosexuality is so deeply embedded in interpretive frameworks, it remains unseen, as do the epistemological privileges that this confers.10 For this reason I do think lesbian historians wrestle with a paradoxical double-bind: wanting to find "evidence" but at the same time wanting to critique the construction and operation of a particular notion of "evidence." Because the researching and writing of lesbian history relies heavily on archival material (letters and diaries frequently) the question of how to read these texts and their often-coded representations of lesbian desire becomes a crucial methodological issue. We tend to pursue specific genres of evidence (such as the "love letter") because we assume they have stronger evidentiary power than any other. Consequently, this article is simultaneously about writing lesbian history and examining the methods of such practice. I reflect on my own practice to shed light on the interpretive challenge that exists for the lesbian historian in the production of lesbian history and on the libidinal investments involved in the pursuit of traces of desire through archival collections.11

VERNON LEE WAS A LESBIAN, BUT . . .

Christa Zorn notes that "critical reactions to Vernon Lee have always been colored by a certain anxiety over prominent female intellectuals."12 Lee's work is currently experiencing a revival as feminist scholars re-evaluate her position as a Victorian female essayist and novelist, and romantic friend to the women with whom she shared her life. In the last year two full-length studies of Lee have been published; pioneering lesbian historian Martha Vicinus has devoted a chapter to Lee in her recent book Intimate Friends; and the University of London hosted the first Vernon Lee conference in June 2003.13 This article is not intended to be the final word on Vernon Lee, but I hope it can intervene in the series of debates that shape the way we think about her place in lesbian history.

It doesn't seem that anyone has much doubt about Vernon Lee's place in lesbian history. While narratives of Vernon Lee's life and work vary in many respects, reflecting in fascinating ways the historical context of their production, I can only conclude that the specter of "the lesbian" has always haunted her.14 It is on this specter, on the ways in which Vernon Lee's sexuality has been constructed in memory and in historical scholarship, that I wish to focus my attention.

The most striking tiling about extant representations of Lee's sexuality is the consistency with which they describe her as a "failed lesbian." For instance, in the British composer Ethel Smyth's assessment, Lee "loved . . . humanly and with passion; but being the stateliest, chastest of beings she refused to face the fact, or indulge in the most innocent demonstrations of affection, preferring to create a fiction that these friends were merely intellectual necessities.'1''15 Smyth was writing in 1940, just five years after Lee's death, in a volume of memoirs entitled What Happened Next. This passage has been quoted by scholars ever since and has been extremely influential in promoting the image of Lee as a woman in denial about her "true" sexuality. However, Smyth was writing at a distance of forty years from the events she described; during this period the ways in which women could think about their same-sex desires had changed considerably.

Possibly the most interesting twist in this story is the inadvertent contribution of Lee's executor, Irene Cooper Willis. Interviewed by Burdett Gardner in the early 1950s for his dissertation on Lee, Willis commented:

Vernon was homosexual, but she never faced up to sexual facts. She was perfectly pure. I think it would have been better off if she had acknowledged it to herself. She had a whole series of passions for women, but they were all perfectly correct. Physical contact she shunned. She was absolutely frustrated. Kit [Thomson] used to say in her letters "I blow you a kiss," but there was nothing the least sensual about her relationship with Kit. It was almost horrible to live in the same house with Vernon. I have never known anyone who had lived on the continent so much to be so prudish.16

We can only speculate about what motivated Willis to be so forthright, but a clue might be found in her "biographical notes" accompanying the collection in which she mentioned that "I worked for her for love I was going to say but it was not love but admiration. I never found the key to her heart."17 Still, this confession begs the question of why she was looking for that key or for the knowledge of Lee's "true" sexuality. As Kathy Psomiades comments:

What's remarkable about these many discussions of Vernon Lee's "refusal" of "sexual facts" is the way in which that refusal itself is hotly eroticized for the women who knew her. Lee's purity is invested with everyone else's erotic desire. And the occasion for the production of erotic discourse about her. The accusation that her desires are really sexual (Vernon thinks she loves ____'s mind, but really she wants to boink her) is also a way of insisting that one's own desires might, but for this, be realized (I want to boink Vernon; and she (really) wants to boink me).18

Burdett Gardner's stated aim was to ascertain "if Vernon Lee was, in fact, a Lesbian, what effect did the neurosis have upon her entire literary product?"19 Christa Zorn notes that "Gardner locates Lee's lesbianism in her nature, whereas he describes the 'symptoms' of her behavior in terms of the [sic] cultural decorum."20 The effect of this (homophobic) representation is that in Gardner's thesis Lee is doubly pathologized, both as a lesbian and as a "failed" lesbian. The incongruity of this contradictory characterization of Vernon Lee highlights the deeply conflicted investments that motivate Gardner's study. As Jagose suggests: "Lesbian visibility is a lure-one that is, moreover, whatever its more immediate impulses, also always in the service of a homophobic imperative to know and mark the lesbian as distinct and identifiable, as emblematic of a certain pathology ... in order to license as natural and in no need of explanation that heterosexual femininity which the lesbian dangerously imitates and from which she must therefore be distinguished. "21

So powerful have these representations of Lee's failed sexuality been that they still circulate without any examination of the foundational assumptions upon which they rest. The most recent incarnation appears in a recent biography of Lee, where literary scholar Vineta Colby portrays her as "constantly struggling but failing to come to terms with her lesbianism."22 Later Colby explicitly describes the relationship between Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson as "in every sense but the physical a devoted lesbian relationship."23 Colby (viewing Lee's sexuality through late-twentieth-century understandings of lesbian identity) presents Lee as in denial of her true sexuality but then goes on to insist that her relationships were "in every sense but the physical" lesbian. There are many assumptions to be unpacked here. First, we should ask, What constitutes a lesbian? What is this lesbian desire everyone is talking about? And what does physical expression have to do with it?

Colby's construction of Lee's sexuality is connected to larger questions of definition and evidence in lesbian history and highlights a particular argument in lesbian historiography known as the "romantic friendship/ lesbianism" debate. Lillian Faderman's groundbreaking book, Surpassing the Love of Men (1981) drew attention to the existence of intense same-sex friendships that, she argued, had been socially accepted and encouraged from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century.24 The last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries saw the "end" of this view, according to Faderman, as sexologists included romantic friendships in their classificatory system of sexual inversion. Martha Vicinus comments that "a major difficulty . . . historians [of romantic friendships] have faced is that of dating: exactly when did the theories of the medical men become well known among the general public?"25 More recently, Marylynne Diggs has argued that "the tidy division between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries misrepresents the varieties of representation, and most importantly resistance."26 Despite the lack of clarity about exactly when and how the earlier model of same-sex love between women gave way to "modern lesbianism," the distinction between romantic friendship and lesbian identity remains crucial in writings about female same-sex intimacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

One of the core issues at stake in the romantic friendship/lesbianism debates has been the experience and expression of sexual passion between predominantly white, educated women of privileged classes.27 Faderman's view was that "these romantic friendships were love relationships in every sense except perhaps the genital, since women in centuries other than ours often internalized the view of females as having little sexual passion."28 Although Faderman did not categorically rule out sexual relations between women, her account gives credence to the notion that these relationships were essentially asexual. Scholars such as Lisa Moore and Judith Halberstam have responded by critiquing what they see as the desexualization of lesbian identity in representations like Faderman's.29 Attempting to shortcircuit what Valerie Traub calls the "sex/no sex" debate, Martha Vicinus asks: "How are we ever to know, definitively, what someone born a hundred or two hundred years ago did in bed? And as [Blanche Wiesen] Cook has pointed out, does it really matter so much?"30 Halberstam responds that "it does indeed matter, because lesbianism has conventionally come to be associated with the asexual, the hidden, the 'apparitional' and the invisible."31 As Sylvia Martin suggests:

The problem of the body underpins the division between romantic friends and lesbians as well as the dimensions of the debate. "Romantic friendship" tries to erase the body, emphasizing love and friendship ... [while] "lesbianism" foregrounds it, stressing sexual desire and practice. Both sides of this argument in fact patronize those past women who had same-sex relationships: the pro-friendship by regarding the overt 1920s lesbians simply as misguided victims of a male-defined model based on masculine/feminine binaries; the pro-lesbian by treating the so-called "romantic friends" as participants in an asexual form of quasi-marriage.32

What I want to highlight here are the two primary (and interrelated) assumptions upon which this distinction relies, which reflect the construction of Vernon Lee as a "failed lesbian." The first assumption is that the sexual component of the relationship is the critical factor in whether it is to be described as "lesbianism" or "romantic friendship," an assumption that raises the important methodological question of how we can ever prove this one way or the other.33 The second assumption is that sexual activity, lesbian identity, and guilty self-consciousness are organically connected in sequence. Discussions of the "romantic friendship/lesbianism" debate are generally framed in an ignorance/knowledge binary where expressions of affection, love, or passion between female friends are described as "unselfconscious" or "innocent." Faderman, for instance, opens her study by asking: "IfI had really uncovered a lesbian relationship, why could I not find any evidence of the guilt and anxiety, the need to keep secrets from family and friends, that I thought were inevitably associated with homosexuality before the days of gay liberation?"34 This ignorance/knowledge, sex/no sex dualism seems to resist our best deconstructive efforts, even though the twenty-three years since the publication of Surpassing the Love of Men have brought enormous changes in understanding of what might constitute a gay or lesbian historical subject and of historiography covering the nineteenth century. One has only to look at histories of the family or discussions of women's same-sex colleges in the northeastern United States to see this intransigent dualism in action. In such studies the notion of asexual romantic friendship is deployed to resolve or deflect the specter of the lesbian.

Further, the presumed asexuality of the "Victorian" woman is contrasted with the more sexually sophisticated position of the scholar.35 Vineta Colby's description of Lee's "failed sexuality" is a case in point. Why is Lee described as failing to come to terms with her lesbianism? Isn't one of the key issues here that Lee has not acknowledged an awareness of her sexual passion? In other words, Lee's love and desire for Thomson cannot be read as satisfactory evidence of a lesbian relationship in the absence of information about the self-consciousness and physical referent of Lee's desire. In fact, the crucial distinction seems to be the question of knowledge: Lee's of her sexuality (read lesbian) and the scholar's of Lee's true sexuality.

Colby's framing of the trope of Lee's failed sexuality underscores the heterosexism inherent in this formulation and the implicit privileging of heterosexuality in the way this trope functions. Colby (along with Smyth and Willis) seems to be saying, "I've read all the correspondence, and there is clearly evidence of lesbian desire, love, or relationships, but there is no evidence that Lee knew this about herself, and she doesn't talk about wanting to boink anyone, so therefore she wasn't really a lesbian even though there is evidence of some sort of textual desire in her archive." What would seemingly make the difference for Colby is an awareness, self-consciousness, or knowledge of physical desire or passion on Lee's part, and without this Colby bounces back to the other side of the sex/no sex formula, implicitly reinforcing heterosexuality's (unquestioned and male-centered) normative status as she does.36 For it must be asked, What would constitute proof of a physical relationship for Colby? Do kisses count? Where do we draw the line between sexual and asexual, and can we know whether these terms would have had any meaning for these women?

As Elizabeth Grosz argues: "When sexuality takes on its status as phallic, entities, organs, pleasures, and fantasies associated with it become definitive. . . . Female sexuality, lesbian desire, is that which eludes and escapes, that which functions as an excess, a remainder uncontained by and unrepresentable with the terms provided by a sexuality that takes itself as straightforwardly being what it is."37 Colby's insistence that Lee and Thomson's relationship was lesbian "in every sense but the physical" also seems reminiscent of the "what do lesbians do in bed?" query that reveals how unthinkable it might be for two women to give each other pleasure.38 As Susanna Rose suggests, "Lesbians might create their own modes of relating that may not parallel heterosexual roles."39 By unthinkingly accepting a heteronormative (and male-focused) framework for interpreting Lee's sexuality, "a value system that can only ever take female sexuality as object, as external, and as alien to the only set of perspectives presenting themselves as true-men's,"40 embedded as it is with a focus on the "visible" and on a heterosexually biased "standard of proof," Colby can only represent Lee's sexuality as that of a "failed" lesbian. Until we interrogate the assumptions involved in these types of constructions, we seem doomed to the restrictive and unnecessary sex/no sex dualism that I have outlined.

What I want to suggest is that one way to break the sex/no sex, knowledge/ignorance binaries that have plagued the romantic friendship debate may be to shift our focus away from questions of identity to focus on the desire that is the implicit (but often unacknowledged) partner in this debate.41 This raises the question, Whose desire is it anyway? As Carol Mavor suggests,

All historical research, whether the objects of study are from a long time ago or yesterday, feeds upon a desire to know, to come closer to the person, object, under study. Though we go to great pains to cover up our desire, to make our voice objective, to see that our findings are grounded, to dismiss our own bodies, we flirt (some of us more overtly, others more secretly) with the past. Flirting, as a game of suspension without the finale of seduction, keeps our subjects alive-ripe for further inquiry, probing further research. The more we flirt, the more we fantasize about our subject, the more elusive and desirable it becomes.42

One of the key features of the romantic friendship discussion is the role of the scholar in the interpretation and analysis of textual traces of desire. As Peter Brooks, reframing Freud's notion of epistemophilia argues, "The desire to know is constructed from sexual desire and curiosity . . . dynamic curiosity that is possibly the foundation of all intellectual activity."43 What I hope to show through a self-reflexive examination of my own "failed" research process is the ways in which a scholar's desire for her subject can be methodologically productive in terms of illuminating the deep-seated motivations and investments that inhabit all scholarship but are rarely acknowledged. Doing so has several implications for a lesbian historian. As Valerie Traub recognizes in her discussion of the "quest for origins," identifying lesbians "is a collective act of historical memory, a means of opening lines of transmission of desire and culture, and a technique for stabilising modern lesbian subjectivity."44 I now turn to a discussion of my research in Vernon Lee's archive and my pursuit of the textual traces of desire in her private correspondence.

ARCHIVE

The Vernon Lee archive is distributed between Colby College, Maine, and Somerville College, Oxford. The Colby archive contains over 3,600 items, and the Somerville archive contains 2,723 items from correspondents such as Aldous Huxley, Henry James, William James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Walter Pater, John Singer Sargent, and John Addington Symonds, to name but a few of the more famous. Lee's executor explained the reasons for dividing the collection in the notes that accompany the Colby bequest. She wrote that "the testamentary instructions directed me to burn all papers of a personal nature as I thought fit but I did not destroy these 'LETTERS HOME' as the directions upon the packets seemed to contemplate future, though distant, publication."45 A solution to her dilemma was to separate out the sensitive material and send only letters that were to be "illustrative of the period and not much else" to Somerville College, Lee's chosen archive. Clearly, both Lee and her executor had a hand in editing the final letters; it is impossible to know who was responsible for some editorial decisions, but many letters contain pages or passages that someone deemed "too sensitive" and removed. The subjects who sparked such editing are the women thought to be her most important loves, Mary Robinson (Duclaux) and Clementina ("Kit") Anstruther-Thomson.46

THE LETTERS: WEIGHT/WAIT OF THE EVIDENCE

It's worth unravelling some of the assumptions that structured my research because they were the catalyst for some of the twists and turns I took in my search for desire in Vernon Lee's letters. From these false starts, cul-de-sacs, and trails that led away from the beaten track, some of the most interesting methodological insights arose. As Seth Lerer notes: "Being wrong is also about being displaced, about wandering, dissenting, emigrating, and alienating."47 I came to Vernon Lee's archive at Colby College with many preconceptions that I now realize both structured my research and shaped the ways in which I have thought about, interpreted, and constructed the material I found. First, I was under the misapprehension that I would find a great cache of love letters between Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, since this relationship has been described as the most important and serious of Lee's life. While I did find a voluminous correspondence between the two, most of my assumptions about this "epistolary intercourse"48 unravelled during the actual process of reading the letters, leaving me with a general sense of uncertainty. The issue was the "ordinariness" of their epistolary exchange; there was little of the passion or desire that I was expecting, hoping for (the irony of my own desiring is obvious in hindsight). The task of defining and identifying traces of desire turns out to be much more complicated than I had first imagined. We seem to think we would know or recognize it, if or when we saw it, but what is iti And how do we know if we've found it? Perhaps, as Catherine Belsey suggests, this is part of its (paradoxical) charm: "Desire eludes final definition, with the result that its character, its nature, its meaning, becomes itself an object of desire for the writer."49

The Colby collection contains 280 letters from Thomson to Lee (1887-1921) and 79 from Lee to Thomson (1894-1908); the Somerville archive contains 284 of Thomson's letters to Lee (1893-1913).50 Lee's letters to Thomson are concentrated in the period after their close relationship had been ended by Thomson, in 1898, with 52 of the extant 79 letters written in 1901. For this reason the remaining letters convey a skewed impression of the relationship and may account for the stubborn persistence of the image of Lee's failed sexuality. Lee's letters to Thomson alternate between nostalgic romanticism (as seen in her romantic narrative about the rose that Kit gave her in 1888 and appeals to Kit to remember the length of time they had spent together) and passionately self-serving appeals to the importance of their "joint work" on aesthetic theory. Her letters are punctuated with appeals to "write to Florence [where she lived] dear Kit"51 and angry ultimatums insisting that Kit come to Florence for an extended period, "otherwise you will come again for a short time only, and that, as I have told you very often merely tears my nerves and my heart."52 Her sentiments seem to show a cyclical pattern that culminated in Lee's emotional distress spilling over, such as when she apologized to Kit for the "weakness which, that day at the club, made me forget that I had promised never to lay any claim, even the slightest, on you."53 This last comment appears in the letter that I quoted at the start of this essay, which shows Lee using the full firepower of her literary abilities to construct a (seductive?) romantic narrative of the beginnings of their relationship. The disjunction between this narrative and the overwhelmingly melancholy, nostalgic, or angry tone of many of Lee's letters highlights the problems of studying a private correspondence in which the bulk of the extant letters date from the period after the relationship has ended and thus are mainly concerned with the grieving process of adjustment to being without the beloved.

On the other hand, more than two-thirds of Thomson's letters are concentrated in the period prior to their break-up in 1898, so we get an entirely different picture of the relationship. Thomson's letters are often fairly tedious, replete with endearments such as "deary little wee," "your poor illy friend," and "baddy little Vernon" scattered throughout the pages of mostly unpunctuated verbiage that Phyllis Mannocchi kindly calls "whimsical free association":54 "Oh Vernon my dear Chap I've gone rambling on and haven't put in any full stops I forgot all about it and poor you that will have to read it, & this part that's going well a full stop here.-& I love you (no stops after that)."55 These letters are full of graphic images, such as her standard sign-off: "I blow you a kiss," which is depicted as a bird, often an entire flock of them, all over the page. This is part of what Mannocchi refers to as their "love language" and what I initially interpreted as referring to the use of code in the letters. Having seen and read the correspondence and knowing that Thomson had trained in Paris as an art student, I would not describe this as a coded language; without Lee's letters from this period it is difficult to make a judgment about whether it was a shared language or Thomson's own quirky style.

I confess to agreeing with Leon Edel's comment that "I was often bored by so much epistolary effort: there are moments when one wishes the telephone had been invented earlier."56 It seems almost sacrilegious to confess to this, and I can't find any instances-aside from Edel-where scholars reflect on this aspect of archival research. The only examples I can think of celebrate the opposite of what I have experienced. Martha Nell Smith, for example, discusses being enthralled by reading Emily Dickinson's letters and poems; in my case, I felt disenchanted by reading. Why don't historians talk about these negative kinds of reactions more frequently? Especially, what investments do we have in promoting a particular mode of thinking about letters? Louise Kaplan suggests that

every story of success in the archives is emotionally charged, for only the most extreme emotions can drive people to the drudgery, to the discomfort, of sitting and sifting through dog-earred documents, manuscripts, microfilms. To reveal those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident or on what unfair forms of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries were based.57

At this point I turned away from the Thomson/Lee letters and began to read the hundreds of letters between Lee and other correspondents in hope of some indication of "romance," desire, or love. I was compelled by a desperate sort of archive fever that drove me to attempt to "sight" what Carolyn Steedman so aptly calls "the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of Everything" that might possibly contain some tiny trace of the desire I was so intent on uncovering.58 I came to Lee's archive expecting to be interested in everything I was reading-I was positioned as a potentially empathetic reader-but I was disappointed. Why? Was it because I had invested in the notion of that eureka moment when I would come across a hidden gem that no other scholars had found? That I would find scintillating and witty letters studded with jewel-like passages in the correspondence between Thomson and Lee as befitting a Victorian female intellectual? Or did I hope to find something akin to the passionate prose and poetry of Emily Dickinson's letters/poems to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson?59 The answer to all of these is yes! I think again of Rosemarie Bodenheimer's questions, and this puts my disappointment into perspective and forces me to face the fact that I had been reading private correspondence. As Mireille Bossis cautions us to remember: "We who read these letters can never forget that we are not their destined recipients."60

My dissatisfaction with the Thomson/Lee letters indirectly started me on the trail of Mary Robinson, looking for love. Serendipitously, I found that the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris housed letters of Mary Robinson Duclaux and Vernon Lee, letters that had, it was assumed, been burned.61 The BNF catalog lists 1,253 folio pages of letters from Lee to Robinson (Duclaux), 1,100 pages between 1880 and 1887. This is the period assumed to cover their relationship, up to the point of Robinson's marriage to James Darmesteter (a marriage to which Lee attributed her extended emotional breakdown in 1887-89, when she was nursed by Thomson).62 As Martha Vicinus comments, nothing exists from the period of their painful breakup.63 You would think that I would have learned a lesson from the weighty but boring correspondence of Thomson and Lee, but no, I still wanted weight, piles of paper, thousands of words. This I pursued, gripped by the most extreme version of archive fever, the delusion that at last, finally, everything would be revealed.64

I saw the Robinson Duclaux/Lee letters as offering tantalizing possibilities for some proof of their desire/love. Even though I was fully aware that I was buying into the evidence/proof issue so fraught with uncertainty in lesbian history, I was still possessed by the desire to find it. I spent the next two years attempting to negotiate the release of a microfilm copy of a small sample of the correspondence that was held up due to copyright issues. This pursuit became a substitute for my research as I became obsessed with what I now saw as the "epistemological black hole" created by not knowing what diis correspondence contained and by my conviction that these nevertheless would be the letters. What was not known could change everything about our understanding of the relationship between Lee and Robinson Duclaux (or so I thought).

I am more realistic now about what the sample might contain, and now that the fever has broken I can see how this pursuit and the disappointments, thwarted expectations, and assumptions that drove my (re)search have shaped my reading of the archive itself. In one very obvious example, which I turn to now to discuss, I failed to see what was right in front of my eyes.

"ALWAYS YOUR OWN MOLLY"

As I mentioned above, there are few surviving communications from Mary Robinson Duclaux to Vernon Lee in the Colby College archive, nine letters and two postcards in total.65 The Somerville archive contains forty items written from Robinson Duclaux to Lee between 1883 and 1932; the bulk are postcards organizing travel arrangements and meeting times during Lee's visits to Robinson Duclaux in Paris as well as a few letters from Robinson Duclaux to Lee.66

If I try to unpack the congruence of factors that merged to prevent me from "seeing" the letters and postcards that do exist from Duclaux to Lee, I can discern two seemingly contradictory conceptions of the notion of weight at work.

In the first instance, when I was at the Somerville archive I was focused on looking for what might constitute love letters (and therefore evidence). Because the postcards from Robinson Duclaux to Lee were about mundane, everyday topics I dismissed them as irrelevant to my search for traces of desire. I was distracted from seeing the number (volume) of postcards that Robinson Duclaux had sent Lee as being significant in any way. However, as Peter Gay notes: "The postcard, introduced in 1869 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in Britain the year after, did not increase the intimacy of the mails but its frequency. . . . Far more than ever before, correspondence spawned, and sustained, the desire for reciprocity; even a letter that did not explicitly beg for a reply was an implicit demand for conversation at a distance."67 Looked at in this context, Robinson Duclaux's postcards to Lee provide evidence of a communication that spanned half a century. What this experience suggests is that we need to be more imaginative in evaluating what counts as correspondence constituting an intimate and affectionate relationship and to be more sensitive to the materiality of the archive. As Mireille Bossis observes: "The words of a letter have a real weight (poids de réel) different from that of the words in any other kind of writing. For writer and recipient the letter is above all an extension of daily life.... It is this real weight which leads love letters to be treated as sacred objects, even fetishes."68 It was the pursuit of these sacred objects (love letters) that motivated my focus on the hefty pile of Bibliothèque nationale letters, as I imagined they would contain the "real weight" I sought. Yet during this entire time I had a small handful of letters from Mary Robinson Duclaux to Vernon Lee that I had dutifully copied but had not transcribed. Because of their seeming lack of weight (volume) I discounted their evidentiary capacity and, in so doing, implicitly structured my research process around a conception of weight as bulk that I had accepted without examination. It was only when my pursuit of the Bibliothèque nationale letters was held up for two years that I turned to reconsider what correspondence I did have from Robinson Duclaux to Lee. In fact, these few letters and postcards do have weight when considered in terms of the traces of desire they contain.

Although they are undated, internal evidence from the letters suggests they were written around 1888-89, immediately after Robinson and Lee's relationship ended.

When I open the past, Vernie, the dear invisible past, it is near always owning to you that I see such beautiful moments in it. Whole years of perfect companionship and-at any rate from 1880 to 1887-a long friendship of absolute trust and satisfaction. I think less people know the value that such a friend as you can give to life and it is with a great élan of gratitude and love dear Vernon that I think of those good days; and I would gladly if I could give you back your peace of mind, even if it were at the price of your forgetting me. For I love you-dear dear friend, with all my heart and soul. You who have been so long the dear glory of my life. . .. But I am not sure you will care to go on knowing Mary Darmesteter. That is what I wish to know dear love. I hope you will say yes and if at the present, as it is very likely, you feel only numb and indiffèrent to me that you will let me send you my letter as the Madonna lets my hand lay flowers on her shrine. I do not think you know, dear Vernon, that the hand is guilty: but that is a point which it is quite unnecessary to discuss.69

In another undated postcard (ca. 1887-89) we can see an example of what Karen Lawrence describes as a "'lover's discourse' . . . a discourse that transforms the beloved's absence into an aesthetic Ordeal of abandonment.'"70 In both of these narratives Robinson emphasizes a romantic vision of their friendship.

Vernie dear, I have vanished like a ghost from your life-and soon you will feel less ravenous [unclear] towards that poor little phantom because she will begin to grow indistinct-blurred forgotten, therefore forgiven for all real or imaginary faults and failures perhaps it is best so. But in case you should ever wish to see her again, to feel my arms around your neck-or to talk to me of your plans and adventures-Darling, my address will be 9 Rue Bara: you remember the little street we liked last year? Ah if you could have only come to be the queen and pearl of the house how much more it would have seemed like home! Molly71

This text contains several interesting features. First, the use of the endearing nicknames, Vernie and Molly, seems intimate and personal in ways that Thomson's letters to Lee never managed. It indicates a shared world of familiarity composed of "two who love," to borrow part of Emily Dickinson's phrase. Moreover, as Anne Carson comments, "Letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet. Letters construct the space of desire and kindle in it those contradictory emotions that keep the lover alert to his own impasse."72 Second, Duclaux switches from third person to first person at a significant moment in the narrative: "But in case you should ever wish to see her again, to feel my arms around your neck," usage which has the effect of bringing her up close and personal with Lee (the imagined reader), evoking a sensual image that would remind Lee of other occasions when Robinson had put her arms around her. This seems deliberately designed to excite her reader's desire; as Robinson asks Lee to imagine feeling her arms around her, she does not say "I wish to put my arms around you." These lines underscore the transformation from ghostly wraith to warm-blooded presence that Duclaux describes in the text.

Third, Robinson links her new address (shared with her husband, James Darmesteter) with an appeal to Lee's memory of their shared enjoyment of "the little street we liked last year." And this sense of Robinson/Lee as a couple is further reiterated in the intriguing and highly suggestive sentence: "Ah if you could have only come to be the queen and pearl of the house how much more it would have seemed like home!" Two points must be raised about this comment. In the first instance we need to ask, What does "queen and pearl" mean? The use of the word "queen" seems fairly straightforward in that it evokes an image of a sovereign ruler, but the use of it in this phrase seems to imply something more romantic, perhaps even an implicit reference to the romantic poet Shelley's "Queen of My Heart," which contains the line "my heart's throned queen." The use of "pearl" is also highly suggestive. Barbara Walker notes that "the ancients gave all pearls the feminine connotation, saying they were made of two female powers, the moon and water."73 Lesbian historian Valerie Traub, who specializes in the early modern period, reads the drop pearl in Elizabethan imagery as the "'seat of woman's delight.' I do not mean to imply that the pearl represents the clitoris in a one-to-one correspondence of signifier and signified . . . [but] one need not posit the clitoris as the source of this image to see in the pearl a metonymy of female pleasure."74

According to Robinson, Lee's presence there as "pearl and queen" would transform the house into a home.75 A fairly common sentiment in this period regarded a woman as "the angel in the house," but when one woman directs that sentiment to another it seems to subvert the conventional usage by suggesting a marital relationship between the two women. This sentence implicitly positions Robinson's "marriage" to Darmesteter as the lesser relationship: with him, the house is just a house, but with Lee, the house would have become a home. Seemingly, the necessary ingredient to effect this transformation was the love relationship shared by Robinson and Lee, one that was not shared by Robinson and her husband. This line also suggests that Lee and Robinson had possibly discussed setting up house together. Indeed, when one reads back over the text with all of die above in mind, it seems possible that Lee and Robinson may have even looked for a house together in the very street where Robinson and her husband moved in. This small amount of text on the back of a postcard certainly does raise some very intriguing possibilities about the relationship between Lee and Robinson.

Reading this postcard alongside the excerpted text from Robinson's letter to Lee quoted above, in which she seems to accept responsibility for Lee's parlous mental and emotional state, we might discern glimpses of a story that has been lost for seeming lack of textual evidence. What I am suggesting is that these two pieces of writing may shed some light on the ending of their relationship. The final sentence in this excerpt-"I do not think you know dear Vernon that the hand is guilty but that is a point which is quite unnecessary to discuss"-seems to suggest that Robinson is confessing to some unknown wrong against Lee. This does not make much sense if Robinson is referring to her marriage to Darmesteter or Lee's breakdown (Robinson had been warned that writing to Lee might cause a relapse), so it is interesting to speculate as to what this might refer. I present only one such reading, based on the context and the larger body of correspondence that I have read. One thing that has persistently struck me is the way that Lee's scholars have dealt with Mary Robinson's relationship with her, with their emphasis on Lee's emotional/mental "breakdown" after Robinson's marriage. Seemingly, this breakdown provides sufficient evidence of Lee's passion for Robinson, as though, to use Jeanette Winterson's words, Lee's passion was "written on the body." There is little discussion of the events that led to the break-up of the relationship. What I want to suggest (in a highly speculative reading) is that we read the postcard in which Robinson seems to suggest that she and Lee had discussed setting up a home together in Paris in the context of the suddenness of her marriage to a man with whom she had a platonic arrangement. An additional context is the history of disagreement between Vernon Lee and Robinson's father. On one occasion these disputes provoked Lee and Robinson to move out of the Robinson family home in London and to relocate to a rented cottage in Sussex for a month; Lee reported to her mother from Sussex that she had to sleep with Mary because there were bugs in her bed. Taken together, these hints allow us to construct a plausible scenario of the circumstances that led to the breakdown of their relationship.

Writing to her mother and brother about the prospective marriage, Lee revealed: "Mary also informed me with a calmness that would have been affronting if it had not been piteous, that her intended was quite willing to consider me in the light of a sister. One has some blood in one's body after all!"76 Lee's final statement is ambiguous: it may be read as meaning she was affronted at having to share Mary with her husband or that she did not have any respect for a man who was willing for his wife to have a "sisterly" relationship (whatever that might mean) with Lee. What this also suggests is that Robinson herself may have had other plans for her relationship with Lee. Referring back to the postcard again, the sentence "Ah if you could have only come to be the queen and pearl of the house how much more it would have seemed like home!" does imply that it was Lee's decision not to be the "queen and pearl" of Robinson's house. Perhaps Robinson and Darmesteter's marriage was a negotiated relationship that would give her freedom from her family and economic security while still allowing her to maintain her relationship with Lee. Perhaps Lee could not agree to the terms, or she made a miscalculation as to Robinson's determination, and that was a factor in the ending of their relationship. As I noted above, this is highly speculative based on some fragmentary textual evidence, but what I want to show is the weight that these few pieces of writing may carry when interpreted in a particular way.

CONFESSIONS OF A ROMANCE JUNKIE

What I like about Robinson's letters is the way they make Lee look more like a passionate woman and less like the "failed lesbian" of popular account. When I scrutinize my response to these letters more closely I realize I am enthralled with Robinson (much as I wanted to be over the Thomson/Lee correspondence) and am enchanted with the persona of Lee that I see through Robinson's eyes. Robinson's two letters seem to have more weight as love letters than Thomson's voluminous correspondence of over 560 letters. Or do they? On what am I basing this reading? It occurs to me that perhaps I am responding to Robinson's writing in a way that I just don't with Thomson's. Maybe Robinson-who would become a well-regarded poet-was simply a better writer than Thomson, and I have responded as a reader to her literary talents. As Catherine Belsey argues, "Desire in western culture is inextricably linked with narrative."77 And as Emma Wilson observes, "Reading entails the mobilization of desire, that, for the reader, meaning is an object of desire, and that libidinal energy is redirected in the desire to know, and enjoy, a text."78 The notion of reading as an active engagement with a text has become a central part of the liberal arts/humanities scholar's practice. The interlinking notions of reading and interpreting archival material become the questions of the archive. As Derrida suggests: "The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. . . . It is a question of the future. . . . The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come, later on or perhaps never."79

Acknowledging the role of the scholar in constructing meaning from a text also forces attention to those processes whereby meaning is formed through analysis, deduction, and interpretation.80 In this specific instance, because I am reading for lesbian history-looking for lesbian relationships, desire, romance, and love-I am also implicitly reading for a narrative of romance. Judith Roof persuasively argues that narrative structure itself reflects the "organizing epistemes and expressions of a figuratively heterosexual reproductive ideology in twentieth-century Western culture. "81 Roof further emphasizes narrative's teleological trajectory that propels the plot and narrative toward a climax (Roof plays on the sexual connotation of this term in her discussion) and that is always imagined as heterosexual: marriage, sex, orgasm, and reproduction. What might this mean for a lesbian (scholar) reading for romance? For one thing it means I need to stop thinking of that climactic endpoint as the purpose of the narrative. My response to Robinson's letters follows this formula, and, because they have been constructed according to a recognizable romance narrative, I am able to "see" the desire they contain. But as Catherine Labio reminds us, "We must take care not to equate visibility and transparency."82

In my reading of the voluminous letters from Kit Thomson I had been searching for desire and romance and found them wanting, which ultimately says more about my assumptions than about anything else. For what constitutes a (lesbian) romance narrative? Perhaps it is "less an absence than a presence that can't be seen."83 To return to Judith Roof's concept of "narrative's heteroideology," it strikes me that because I was reading through the lens of a generic romance narrative that reproduces the heterosexual "marriage plot," a story that ends with that climactic scene, it was almost impossible to think outside of that trajectory of desire. I needed to face the fact that I had to look for other ways to recognize and evaluate the same-sex desire in Lee's archive. It is now clear that Thomson's letters require me to think creatively and to be methodologically innovative. Only after I reject conventional (hetero)methodological assumptions will I be able to adopt another way of looking. Thinking further about Thomson's letters to Lee, I begin to realize that I won't find what I'm looking for in any one individual letter. Rather, it is in the very material weight of the letters, in their volume, that I may discern an alternative way of conceptualizing this desire. Leon Edel quotes Lytton Strachey's advice for biographers who deal with a vast sea of data: "Row out on the great archival lake and lower a little bucket, bring up some characteristic specimens and examine them with cautious and refined curiosity."84 Perhaps what I need to do here is step back from the shore and actually look at the nature of the lake, rather than the contents of the bucket. As Catherine Labio points out, "We refer, almost invariably, to the contents of the letters, not to their physical properties."85 Content aside for the moment, if we look to the volume of letters from Thomson to Lee we can see that the accumulation of letters builds pressure on Lee as the subject, as Peter Gay remarks of the mass production that was Victorian letter writing: "A letter was a token, the token of true affection, proof that the other was ready to set aside valuable time to visualising, and addressing, the loved one."86 For all that we end up looking for textual traces, it comes to this question: Does size count?

The answer is yes. And no. If I argue that the evidentiary power of Thomson's letters is in its literal weight, its materiality, its enormity, then what do I have to say about the paucity of Robinson's surviving letters to Lee? What I want to suggest is that we need to be creative in our approach to the archive and that individual sets of letters may require us to be resourceful and prepared to reconfigure our methods according to what we find when we get there. In the case of Mary Robinson Duclaux's few letters to Vernon Lee, I employed a close textual reading of a single postcard to illustrate that it is possible to present an alternative account of the breakdown of the relationship between Robinson and Lee. When the issue of weight is viewed in this way, the question becomes, When is it enough? When will we have had enough-desire, words, pages, paper, letters-evidence to satisfy this elusive conception of proof? Is one letter enough, or do we need to see 560 to find some "truth" of the desire we have been searching for? With the Thomson/Lee correspondence I showed that focusing on a limited conception of desire blinded me to seeing the real weight of its evidence, that of the extent of the relationship, in its everydayness, in the discussions over money and payment of bills, travel arrangements that would enable them to spend time together, shared lives tiiat perhaps needed no explicit announcement of physical passion since it was there in the daily intimacies that are not counted as such in the heteroimagination and its conventional romance narratives. The challenge is to continue to highlight the lack of that imagination in thinking about and researching the lives of women who loved women in the past, to reveal its epistemological privileges that are embedded and unspoken, and to draw attention to the problems generated by the archival research process in lesbian history. The interlinked issues of definition and evidence, interpretation and reading are integral to a theoretically rigorous lesbian historiography that challenges the foundational assumptions of historical practice and the epistemological privileges of heterosexuality.

In a short supernatural story called Amour Dure Vernon Lee (it seems to me) has great fun with the dishevelled nineteenth-century historian Spiridion Trepka, who becomes obsessed with his archival research, and Medea da Carpi, a woman who has been dead for over three hundred years. Christa Zorn observes that "his obsessive narrative shows his desire for Medea is not different from that of other men (lovers and historians alike), in short, the desire to possess a woman through possessing her text."87 An interesting feature of the story is the two material objects that remain in Trepka's possession after his meeting with the ghostly Medea: a rose and a letter.88 I don't think it is any coincidence that for Lee these artifacts symbolize the archival manifestation of desire and that she left behind the same tokens for another scholar to find and perhaps to see that "the rose which last night seemed freshly plucked, full of colour and perfume, is brown, dry-a thing kept for centuries between the leaves of a book-it has crumbled into dust between my fingers."89

Sidebar

I would like to thank Julian Carter, Maryanne Dever, Marian Quartly, and the original reviewer of this paper for their insightful comments and suggestions. My research was assisted by a generous grant from AFUW Victoria, and I am grateful for their support of my work.

Footnote

1 Vernon Lee was the pseudonym assumed by Violet Paget "for a series of articles that she published in the Italian journal La rivista europa in 1875" (Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography [Charlottesville, 2003], 2). The exact details of the transformation of Violet into Vernon are unclear, although I am inclined to disagree with Colby's version of the interchangeable use of Violet Paget and Vernon Lee: "But she never abandoned her birth name of Violet Paget, using it in personal correspondence interchangeably with Vernon Lee" (xi). According to Burdett Gardner, Lee "jealously reserved the right to call her 'Vernon' to those initiated ones who had accepted the challenge of the 'soul-life'" (The Lesbian Imagination, Victorian Style: A Psychological and Critical Study of "Vernon Lee, " Harvard Dissertations in American and English Literature [New York, 1987], 278). It seems clear to me that Vernon Lee was much more than a pseudonym; it was, as Lee's executor, Irene Cooper Willis, makes clear in the following letter, her chosen name and identification (whatever that may have encompassed): "I must ask you to call [the catalog] the Vernon Lee issue. Except to mere acquaintances she was never known as Miss Paget: and she would have objected strongly to being referred to as Violet Paget in connection with her writings and papers. She was always known and thought of by her friends and readers as Vernon Lee" (Irene Cooper Willis to Professor Carl Weber, Colby College, 22 August 1952, Miller Library, Vernon Lee collection, Colby College, Waterville, Maine).

2 Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 2.

3 Agnes Mary Frances Robinson (1857-1944), who in her lifetime became a well-known poet, was born in England but lived for many years in France. Between 1888 and 1894 she was married to James Darmesteter, a scholar of Persian literature and religion and a member of the Collège de France. Between 1901 and 1904, after Darmesteter died, she was married to Èmile Duclaux of the Pasteur Institute.

4 Vernon Lee to C. Anstruther-Thomson, letter no. 870, dated 18 August 1904.

5 Phyllis F. Mannocchi, "Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther Thomson: A Study of Love and Collaboration between Romantic Friends," Women's Studies 12, no. 2 (1986): 132. The German phrase comes from a love poem Amy Levy wrote for Lee, with whom she was in love. Linda Hunt Beckman comments: "That Vernon would use Levy's words to express feelings and hopes for a romantic liaison with someone else captures the pathos of their entire relationship. Lee cannot be blamed for not returning Levy's affection, but appropriating Levy's words of love shows an emotional insensitivity that was characteristic of her" (Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters [Athens, Ohio, 2000], 148). It also points to the constructedness of this narrative as self-consciously romantic.

6 Someone very sensibly suggested that after 120 years it might have just disintegrated, but I still wanted to see the dust if it was there!

7 Burdett Gardner reads in this narrative a "romantic note . . . [that] makes it more than obvious that Violet's attachment was based upon physical passion" (203). I am not so convinced that it is obvious. Neither is Phyllis Mannocchi, who suggests: "In the private world of the Vernon-Kit correspondence . . . there is no direct expression of physical attraction or of the physical aspects of the love relationship" (134). I am aware of the irony of my position as a lesbian historian who does desperately want to find evidence of lesbian desire/relationships in an historical context challenging this statement, but I want to resist Gardner's reductive assumptions and unravel some of the processes that are involved in reading this narrative.

8 Fredric Jameson, "On the Sexual Production of Western Subjectivity, or, Saint Augustine as a Social Democrat," in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Ziézek, eds., Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham, N.C., 1996), 155.

9 Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002), 3.

10 Ibid., 144. For a specific discussion of lesbian epistemologies see Sandra G. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991); for a discussion of the heterosexism implicit in research on lesbians see Suzanna Rose, "Heterosexism and the Study of Women's Romantic and Friend Relationships," Journal of Social Issues 56, no. 2 (2000). I am indebted to Thomas Dowson for sharing his work and discussions of the operations of epistemological privilege in archaeological discourse. See his unpublished paper "Queering Archaeology: Disrupting Epistemological Privilege and Heteronormativity in Archaeological Practice," 2004.

11 Critiquing the concept of objectivity in scholarly work has been a major methodological and epistemological project of feminist scholarship over the last three decades. See Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" ( London, 1993), 225. On feminist research methodologies and epistemology see, for example, Alison M. Jagger, "Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology," in Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (London, 1996), 166-90; Joan Acker et al., "Objectivity and Truth: Problems in Doing Feminist Research," in Mary Fonow and Judith Cook, eds., Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research (Bloomington, 1991), 133-53; Catherine Waldby, "Feminism and Method," in Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle, eds., Transitions: New Australian Feminisms (St. Leonards, 1995), 23.

12 Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens, Ohio, 2003), 12.

13 Colby; Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women WboLoved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago, 2004); Zorn. The conference, "Vernon Lee: Literary Revenant," was hosted by the London Institute for English Studies, London University. Outside of the scholarly domain Lee is best remembered for her "supernatural tales," and several reprints of collected stories have recently been published; these stories have garnered her a surprising fan base and web presence, as a quick Google search confirms.

14 I use the term to invoke Terry Castle's discussion of the "apparitional lesbian," although I would argue that in this case the specter of lesbianism has made Vernon Lee's sexuality hypervisible, with the effect that her work/life has been read through a homophobic lens. See Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York, 1993).

15 Ethel Smyth, What Happened Next (London, 1940), 28.

16 Irene Cooper Willis quoted in Gardner, 85. Having read a draft copy of the thesis, Willis responded immediately to Gardner: "My hair has almost literally stood on end while reading the biographical part of your typescript. ... I cannot help saying that I regard the inclusion of these as an outrageous breach of confidence and I regard your extracts from my Preface, my memoranda and notes to you about V.L. when we met in the same light. Anything I may have said to you at our meetings was said confidentially on the understanding that I made clear to you in my first letter" (Lee prohibited a biography and stipulated her letters were "not to be read except privately until 1980") (Irene Cooper Willis to Burdett Gardner, 14 January 1955, Vernon Lee Papers, Colby College).

17 Irene Cooper Willis, biographical essay, chap. 4, undated typescript notes, 17, Vernon Lee collection, Colby College. Another explanation may be that she relished her role as what Ian Hamilton calls the "keeper of the flame" and the insider with the real truth/knowledge about Lee (Keepers of the flame: Literary Estates ana the Rise of Biography [London, 1993]).

18 Kathy Psomiades, "'Still Burning from This Strangling Embrace': Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics," in Richard Dellamora, ed., Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago, 1999), 30.

19 Gardner, 28. Biographical details about Burdett Gardner are sketchy, but I have been able to ascertain that he did one year of coursework at Colby College in 1935, which may explain how he knew about the donation of Vernon Lee's papers (email communication with Professor Eileen Curran, Colby College, 1 September 2004). Although Cooper Willis did not officially deposit Lee's letters until 1951, there was preparatory communication with Professor C. J. Weber in the decade prior to this date.

20 Zorn, 174 n. 26.

21 Jagose, 143.

22 Colby, 2.

23 Ibid., 129.

24 Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York, 1981), 16.

25 Martha Vicinus, "Distance and Desire: English Boarding School Friendships," Signs 9, no. 4 (1984): 601. Havelock Ellis, as Esther Newton comments, "simplified Krafft-Ebing's four part typology [with] an ascending scale of inversion, beginning with women involved in 'passionate friendships'" ("The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman," Signs 9, no. 4 [1984]: 567). For a discussion of sexology in the U.S. context see Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, N.C., 2000), 156-79. For a discussion of sexology in the British context see Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Lift: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain ( New Haven, Conn., 1995). Phyllis Grosskurth, in her biography of J. A. Symonds, drops the fascinating snippet of information about Mary Robinson and Vernon Lee that "Havelock Ellis later suggested to Symonds that the pair might serve as a possible case-history for the section on Lesbianism in Sexual Inversion" (John Addington Symonds: A Biography [London, 1964], 223). Unfortunately, it is difficult to ascertain any more detail, as the footnote is not referenced.

26 Marylynne Diggs, "Romantic Friends or a 'Different Race of Creatures'? The Representation of Lesbian Pathology in Nineteenth Century America," Feminist Studies 21, no. 2 (1995): 2.

27 With the exception of Karen V. Hansen, '"No Kisses Is Like Youres': An Erotic Friendship between Two African-American Women During the Mid-Nineteenth Century," Gender and History7, no. 2 (1995). As Hansen notes, the absence of source material from African American women in this period makes the Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus correspondence extremely valuable for providing an insight into their relationship and also community attitudes about their passionate love for each other.

28 Faderman, 16.

29 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, N.C., 1998); Lisa Moore, "'Something More Tender Still dian Friendship': Romantic Friendship in Early-Nineteenth Century England," in Martha Vicinus, ed., Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader (Bloomington, 1996).

30 Martha Vicinus quoted in Halberstam, 56.

31 Ibid.

32 Sylvia Martin, "These Walls of Flesh: The Problem of the Body in the Romantic Friendship/Lesbianism Debate," Historical Reflections 20, no. 2 (1994): 249.

33 As the Lesbian History group noted back in 1989, heterosexual relationships would face similar issues without the "proof" that the production of children may be said to constitute (and if there were not the implicit assumption of heterosexuality in all relationships unless "proven" otherwise). See Sheila Jeffreys, "Does It Matter If They Did It?" in Lesbian History Group, Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History, 1840-1985 (London, 1989), 7-8.

34 Faderman, 15.

35 For example, see Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, Conn., 1977); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York, 1984); and Carol Lasser, "'Let us be sisters forever': The Sororal Mode of Nineteenth-Century Female Friendship," Signs 14, no. 1 (1988): 158-81.

36 See Stevi Jackson for a discussion of the necessity of a twofold critique of heterosexuality, incorporating heteronormativity and the recognition of heterosexuality as systematically male-dominated (Heterosexuality in Question [Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1999], 159-85).

37 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies (Sydney, 1995), 222-23.

38 This is captured beautifully in Andrew Davies' screen adaptation of Sarah Water's Tipping the Velvet, when Walter Bliss, Nan's rival for Kitty's love, says to her, "Wouldn't use that word [fuck] for anything a pair of gals could do. You need a man for that I think you'll find" ( Tipping the Velvet [2002], produced by Georgina Lowe, directed by Geoffrey Sax, BBC, on DVD).

39 Rose, 319.

40 Grosz, 222.

41 See chapter 5, "Poetry and Desire," for Sylvia Martin's thoughtful and insightful discussion of questions of identity and desire in Mary Fullerton's poetry (Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton & Miles Franklin [London, 2001]).

42 Carol Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (Durham, N.C., 1999), 16.

43 Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), viii-5.

44 Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002), 352.

45 Willis, biographical essay, 2.

46 For example, a letter to Thomson dated New Year's Day 1902 ends abruptly with the sentence: "Talking with M Duclaux I felt . . ." In another letter dated 24 June 1902 Lee writes to Kit: "Dear Kit I want you to know how grateful I am . . ."; the rest of the letter is again missing. Occasionally, the letters have been torn, and there is visible evidence of the missing part. At other rimes entire pages are missing, which can make reading them a confusing process because of the way Lee wrote down the right side of the paper and then over to the back across from left to right and then over again to the left. This is all then written across at times to use every scrap of blank paper, so when a page is missing, it's rather like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle simply trying to make sense of the writing, let alone to derive some meaning from the text.

47 Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York, 2002), 2.

48 A term used by Eugene Lee Hamilton in a letter dated 10 September 1888 quoted in Gardner, 199-200.

49 Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford, 1994), 3.

50 There is no indication of how Lee got her letters back, although this was possibly after Thomson's death. Lee was able to go through Kit's papers to put together Art & Man, a collection of Thomson's work drawn from essays and diary notes.

51 Vernon Lee to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 25 October 1902, Vernon Lee Papers, Colby College.

52 Vernon Lee to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 7 April 1908, Vernon Lee Papers, Colby College.

53 Vernon Lee to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 18 August 1904, Vernon Lee Papers, Colby College.

54 Mannocchi, 134.

55 "How are you? You don't tell me baddy little Vernon and it's the thing I want to know most" (Clementina Anstruther-Thomson to Vernon Lee, n.d., two sheets, folder 3: 1889-1894, Colby College).

56 Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York, 1984), 240.

57 Louise Kaplan, "Archive Fever: Material Reality and Psychic Reality in Biography," Biography and Source Studies 6 (2001): 104.

58 Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester, 2001), 18.

59 Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (Austin, 1992); Martha Nell Smith and Louise Hart Ellen, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Ashfield, Mass., 1998).

60 Mireille Bossis, "Methodological Journeys through Correspondences," Tale French Studies: Men/Women of Letters 71 (1986): 69.

61 Reading The Gender of History I came across a footnote that referred to letters of MRD and VL at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice [Cambridge, Mass., 1998], 283 n. 13).

62 James Darmesteter "was a Professor of language and literature at the Collège de France, with a doctorate in letters awarded in 1877 and a reputation as the foremost scholar of ancient Persian in Europe" (Colby, 121). Robinson asked Darmesteter to marry her after a short correspondence and only three meetings. The marriage was opposed by her family as well as Lee because he had been crippled by a spinal injury/disease and perhaps because he was Jewish. Lee later regretted her attitude and wrote to Kit that she had been blinded by jealousy (Vernon Lee to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 28 July [dated as 1895 by ICW], Vernon Lee Papers, Colby College).

63 Vicinus, xxxii.

64 "It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away" (Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, ed. Eric Prenowitz [Chicago, 1996], 91).

65 The quote in the subhead above is from a postcard from Mary Robinson Darmesteter to Vernon Lee, 23 September 1884, Vernon Lee Papers, Colby College.

66 Vernon Lee's communications with Mary Robinson Duclaux began before Mary's first marriage and continued well after the death of Mary's second husband, Émile Duclaux. When referring to correspondence that originated before Mary's marriages I use the name Robinson. When referring to later correspondence or the collection in toto I use the name Robinson Duclaux.

67 Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, vol. 4 (London, 1998), 317.

68 Bossis, 64.

69 MRD to VL, n.d., Vernon Lee Papers, Colby College.

70 Karen Lawrence, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition, Reading Women Writing (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 75.

71 MRD to VL, postcard, n.d., possibly 1887-89, Vernon Lee Papers, Colby College.

72 Anne Carson and Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, D.C.), Eros the Bittersweet: An Esray (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 92.

73 Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco, 1983), 780.

74 Traub, 129.

75 As well as publishing several volumes of poetry, Robinson was also a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, whose website describes her as "one of the previously unacknowledged heroines of the British literary establishment. . . . In the first 1,000 issues of the TLS Mme Duclaux reviewed 338 books, among them many of the leading French publications of the day" (http://www.tls.psmedia.com/firstl.htm, accessed 10 August 2004).

76 Irene Cooper Willis, ed., Vernon Lee's Letters (London, 1937), 272.

77 Belsey, ix.

78 Emma Wilson, Sexuality and the Reading Encounter (Oxford, 1996), 9.

79 Derrida, 36.

80 Hayden V. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, Md., 1987), 60. It also entails an awareness of the tropes and narratives that structure our reading and writing and through which we structure our material. Also see Hayden V. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md., 1978), 2.

81 Judith Roof, Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative, Between Men-between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies (New York, 1996), xxvii.

82 Catherine Labio, "Woman Viewing a Letter," L'Esprit Createur 40, no. 4 (2000): 10.

83 Jagose, 3.

84 Kaplan.

85 Labio, 7.

86 Gay, 319. The volume of letters was facilitated by seven postal deliveries a day in London (http://www.victorianlondon.org/communicarions/dickens-postalregulations.htm, accessed 10 September 2004).

87 Zorn, 163.

88 Ibid., 161.

89 Vernon Lee, Supernatural Tales: Excursions into Fantasy (London, 1955), 118.