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Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the Franco-British writer Violet Paget (1856-1935). For over 50 years, Paget churned out works of both fiction and nonfiction at the rate of nearly a book a year. Perhaps best remembered today for her supernatural short stories, Paget produced a number of books with essays about travel and place. Genius Loci: Notes on Places (1899) was her first.
Genius Loci is not a guidebook or a novel, but an intimate diary or, better said, a series of billets-doux to the places with which Paget has fallen in love. In the book, Paget offers vignettes and postcard-like snapshots of the memory and life of someone who attempted to breathe in the essence of Italy, France, Germany, and Switzerland. Paget's reflections and her erudite insights into the histories of place, art, and literature shine as brightly as they are fleeting. Though her travel writing is little read today, her presence is felt in contemporary travel literature.
Genius Loci represents travel for the sake of travel, experience for the sake of experience, love for the sake of love, and, not least, art for the sake of art.
This Adventures in Ideas reissue contains a new foreword by Jeremy Bassetti.
About the author
Violet Paget (14 October 1856-13 February 1935) wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Lee. Today, she is well known for her supernatural literature and aesthetic work. She was an early admirer of Walter Pater and authored over a dozen volumes of articles on art, music, and travel. Violet Paget was born in France on October 14, 1856, at Château St Leonard in Boulogne, to British expatriate parents Henry Ferguson Paget and Matilda Lee Hamilton (née Adams). Violet Paget was Eugene Jacob Lee-Hamilton's (1845-1907) half-sister from her mother's first marriage, and she adopted her own pseudonym after his surname.
