CfP: Dedication – Unfurling Vernon Lee’s Kinship Networks

Call For Papers

Dedication: Unfurling Vernon Lee’s Kinship Networks An International Vernon Lee Society Symposium
Online, 16 & 17 October 2024

In the essay ‘New Friends and Old’ in Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of Life (1903), Vernon Lee writes:

We are (luckily for every one) such imitative creatures that every person we like much, adds a new possible form, a new pattern, to our understanding and our feeling; making us, through the pleasantness of novelty, see and feel a little as that person does. And when, instead of liking (which is the verb belonging rather to good acquaintance, accidental relationship as distinguished from real friendship), it is a case of loving (in the sense in which we really love a place, a piece of music, or even, very often, an animal), there is something more important and excellent even than this (p. 68).

This is an excellent distillation of Lee’s expansive definition of kinship, which incorporates not only human connections, but also affective bonds with places, music, and animals. In a subsequent essay in the collection, ‘Other Friendships’, Lee describes the process of developing kinship with ‘a small boy, a baby almost, jumping and rolling (a practice intolerable in any child but him) on the seat of a second-class carriage’, as well as being ‘comforted’ by ‘a group of slender, whispering poplars by a mill’ and by ‘the dear little Gothic church of a tiny town of Western France’ (pp. 79, 81). Here, Lee finds kinship with the animate and the inanimate, the known and the unknown, and with the natural and the human-made.

Lee’s networks included a wide circle of friends and acquaintances with whom she corresponded over more than six decades. They included writers, artists, psychologists, archaeologists, economists, and campaigners on social and political issues (pacifism, antivivisectionism). The publication of the Selected Letters of Vernon Lee provides a wealth of material, demonstrating the extent of her personal and professional networks, from her early mentors Henrietta Jenkin and Linda Villari in the 1870s, to members of the Bloomsbury set such as Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. Given that Lee is often thought of as a fin-de-siècle writer, we would particularly encourage work which takes seriously Lee’s continued engagement with intellectual life into the twentieth century, including her correspondence with figures such as H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw and Desmond MacCarthy.

Kinship has, of late, become a particularly important locus of discussion in queer studies, borne out of queer theorists’ work on the family and on alternative affective and communitarian relationships. Kristin Mahoney’s 2022 monograph Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family discusses the author and socialite Harold Acton’s decades-long fascination with Vernon Lee’s writings. In her 2024 The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism, the historian Jennifer V. Evans theorises queer kinship as ‘the coalitions, attachments, hookups, and solidarities of choice and necessity that [make] up queer life’, and encourages scholars to see ‘queer and trans* lives as associative, as part of elaborate histories of relationality, of kinships bad as well as good’ (pp. 2, 7). Queer kinship is useful because it enables us to think, with Vernon Lee, beyond the normative affective bonds of the familial, and of the human, and also to acknowledge the complexity and perhaps the negativity of such attachments. We invite proposals for 15-minute papers on any topic relating to Vernon Lee and her kinship networks, broadly defined, for a Symposium to be held online in October 2024, organised under the auspices of the International Vernon Lee society.

Topics could include:

• Queer kinship/ kinship as viewed through the lens of gender and/or sexuality
• Different networks of relationality (family, friendship, companionship)
• Mentorship: the relationship between the young Lee and her mentors
• Lee’s mentorship of other writers
• Lee and Bloomsbury/Modernism
• Lee and the networks of socialism; pacifism; other social causes
• Lee’s kinship with the past
• Material evidence of kinship: Lee’s book dedications to friends and authors she admired, and vice versa
• Kinship with the natural world
• Kinship with the material world
• Kinship extending beyond Vernon Lee’s lifespan: those who continued to read and write about Lee; reprints of Lee’s works
• Transnational kinship/kinship extending beyond national and linguistic borders
• Kinship between writer and reader

Please submit a 250 word abstract and a brief bio to leekinshipconference2024@gmail.com by 31st May 2024. All questions can be directed to leekinshipconference2024@gmail.com.