Motor Types: Vernon Lee's Kinaesthetics

Abstract: This article considers how the writer Vernon Lee and her partner Clementina Anstruther-Thomson drew on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century investigations into kinaesthesia, the sense of movement, to formulate their original theory of aesthetic pleasure. While it is often neglected in histories of the sensorium, the sense of movement is central to Lee and Anstruther-Thomson's emphasis on the physiological aspects of aesthetic "empathy" ( Einfühlung ), which they present as a dynamic form of "in-feeling" between observer and object, mingling their reflections on art with moments of queer intersubjectivity. Following their kinaesthetic concepts from the collaborative essay Beauty and Ugliness (1897) to Lee's wartime play The Ballet of the Nations (1915) and her late collection The Handling of Words (1923), this article illuminates the vital place of movement in Lee and Anstruther-Thomson's wide-ranging depictions of sensory feeling, showing how kinaesthesia became central, in their view, to the operations of a critically engaged empathetic mind.