MARSYAS IN FLANDERS,
by Vernon Lee
INTRODUCTION
“Vernon Lee” was the pseudonym of the British writer Violet Paget (1856–1935). She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction, much of it influenced by her lesbianism and feminism, as well as for her books and essays on aesthetics. (An early follower of Walter Pater, she published more than a dozen books on art, music, and travel—and far more essays for magazines.) Along with Pater and John Addington Symonds, she was considered an authority on the Italian Renaissance, and two of her works deal with it explicitly: Euphorion (1884) and Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895).
But it’s her supernatural fiction that’s to hand. Montague Summers compared her work favorably to M.R. James. Themes of thwarted creativity, s****l tens
