Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists Paderborn University, Germany Artistic experience: Psychology in Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)(1856–1935) Therese Boos Dykeman Vernon Lee’s 1912 Beauty and Ugliness was her first attempt at a psychological aesthetics. Having read William James and Théodore Lipps and corresponded with Karl Gross and other German psychologists in the late 1880’s, Lee first broached the notion of psychological aesthetics in 1897, making her one of the earliest to recognize psychology in relation to art. Lee experimented by recording her own psychological feelings as she experienced individual works of art and surveyed others’ experiences. In her vision of “aesthetic activity” as psychological, Lee reasoned that because art arises from the inner self, art is disclosed as psychological as well as cerebral:“The past can give us and should give us, not merely ideas but emotion.” In Baldwin Lee had recognized the importance of personality and freedom. But in examining the psychology of artistic experience, in Beauty and Ugliness, Lee focused on empathy. One of the first to“mobilize a concept of empathy” in the early 20th century, the word originating from the German term Einfühlung by which was meant“feeling ourselves into.” Empathy as“activity of the soul” emanates from one’s mental rather than sensational activity. A movement, empathy inhabits a space that recognizes separation or boundaries of resistance involving, e.g. aesthetic form and psychic conditions. Form is also movement, a line moves. The process of formal-dynamic empathy engages the interplay of forces suggested by e.g. shape. A physical reaction to artistic experience is not necessary, but may be a means of elucidating aesthetic empathy. This physical-psychical connection between man and art is also spiritual, and so the whole self must be prepared for appreciation of artistic experience of seeing, understanding, and enjoying. A self“sees and remembers what he sees” and so must understand and experience in a reflexive process both art and life. Primary Sources: Anstruther-Thomson, Clementina& Lee, Vernon 1924. Art and Man: Essays and https://hwps.de/ecc/ 1/3

Fragments. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head. Lee, Vernon 1884. Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and Medieval in the Renaissance. 2 vols. London: T. Fisher Unwin. __________ 1886. Baldwin: A Book of Dialogues. London. T. Fisher Unwin. __________ 1909. Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life. London and New York: John Lane, The Bodley Head. __________ 1912. Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London: John Lane. __________ 1913. The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Secondary Sources: Baldacchino, Rachel 2017. Being in Borders; Vernon Lee, Empathy and Pacifist Resistance, in Les femmes et la pensée politique: Vernon Lee et les cercles radicaux/Women and Political Theory: Vernon Lee and Radical Circles. Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, 44–55. Denisoff, Dennis 2000. The Forest Beyond the Frame: Picturing women’s desires in Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf, in Psomiades, Kathy Alexis& Shaffer, Talia(eds.): Women and British Aestheticism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 251–69. Dykeman, Therese Boos 2017. Vernon Lee and Ednah Dow Cheney: Aesthetics, Art, and Affect, in Les femmes et la pensée politique: Vernon Lee et les cercles radicaux/Women and Political Theory: Vernon Lee and Radical Circles. Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, 56–71. Fraser, Hilary 1989. Women and the Ends of Art History: Vision and Corporeality in Nineteenth Century Discourse, in Victorian Studies 42:1, 77–100. Maltz, Diana 2000.“Engaging‘Delicate Brains”: From working class enculturation to upper-class lesbian liberation in Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s Psychological Aesthetics, in Psomiades, Kathy Alexis& Shaffer, Talia(eds.): Women and British Aestheticism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 211–29. Maxwell, Catherine& Pulham, Patricia(eds.) 2006. Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics. Basington, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pulham, Patricia 2008. Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. https://hwps.de/ecc/ 2/3

Keywords: activity, Einfühlung, empathy, movement, process, psychology, psychological aesthetics, William James, Théodore Lipps, Karl Gross https://hwps.de/ecc/ 3/3