Writing Cosmopolis: The Cosmopolitan Aesthetics of Emilia Dilke and Vernon Lee

Abstract

In his 1920 review of Vernon Lee’s avant-garde pacifist allegory Satan, the Waster: A Philosophical Trilogy, George Bernard Shaw salutes the author as a representative of ‘the old guard of Victorian cosmopolitan intellectualism’. Shaw’s formulation reflects the fact that he is writing after the watershed (and bloodshed) of World War I had rendered cosmopolitanism a contested concept. He looks back nostalgically to a cultural moment when the idea of transnational European cooperation seemed both right-thinking and realizable, a moment that he identifies with the figure of Vernon Lee (1856–1935). A century on, as we face another watershed in Anglo-European relations, it seems timely to revisit that cosmopolitan ideal, at once old guard and avant-garde, and how it inflected Victorian cultural history. This article will take a particular aspect of Lee’s protean oeuvre — her contribution to the historiography of art — as a starting point for reflecting on the cosmopolitan mobility of nineteenth-century female art historians, and how their unsettling subversion of national cultural boundaries was a shaping factor in the evolving identity of British art and art history as produced in Great Britain. It will consider in particular the transnational contribution of the late-Victorian historian of French art, Emilia Dilke (1840–1904), alongside Lee’s own books on Renaissance Italy.