Abstract
This chapter analyses Vernon Lee’s Italian settings for the supernatural, borrowing from arguments about Gothic Italy as both tourist destination and “museum of antiquities.” It reconsiders Lee’s essay “In Praise of Old Houses” (1897), and her diary notes on Italian churches and cathedrals, outlining her arguments about the “rapture” of the past. In “A Wicked Voice” and “Winthrop’s Adventure” sacred space, with its decaying, crypt-like interiors, is rendered uncanny. Lee’s intervention in modernist debates about ruin and dust is traced in relation to philosophical debates about the aesthetics of decay by Rose Macaulay and Dylan Trigg. The chapter draws on Michel de Certeau’s discussions of walking to illuminate women’s navigation of urban space and museum-like interiors in “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” and “The Doll.”
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Liggins, E. (2020). The Rapture of Old Houses: Dust, Decay and Sacred Space in Vernon Lee’s Italian ghost stories. In: The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_4
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