“The Beauty of Life”: Reciprocity, Aesthetics, and Ecological Ethics in Vernon Lee and William Morris

Abstract: This essay traces a shared, radical ecological ethics in the works of William Morris and Vernon Lee. Arising amid the particularities of late Victorian industrial capitalism, this ethics destabilizes the singularity of the human in the story of human/environmental relations. Both writers tease out, in fictional and nonfictional forms, the political implications of an environmental awareness shaped by aesthetic and historical analyses of the world, as well as by more embodied responses to immediate surroundings. Drawing on the works of phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michael Marder, this essay locates Morris and Lee in an ongoing tradition of thinking about human/nonhuman relations as reciprocal, while also arguing that each author complicates understandings of reciprocity by setting it in relation to questions of justice and equality essential to what both writers describe as the “beauty of life.”