Aesthetic Revenants and the Neo-Decadent Afterlife of Vernon Lee

Anglo-Italian author Vernon Lee (1856-1935) and Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) shared a style of writing which has been described by Emily Anne Rabiner in The Decadent Renaissance: The Antimodern Seductions of Gabriele D’Annunzio and Vernon Lee as ‘Decadent Renaissance: a revival of, or a neo-Renaissance approach to aesthetics and sexuality’. It suggests ‘a version of Renaissance Revivalism that privileges fantastical transformation’ and is ‘concerned with the possibility of embodied, often dangerously erotic, encounters with the past’.