Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

Originating in a critical examination of Vernon Lee's perceived ugliness and her excessive talking among acquaintances, this essay situates historically series portraits which she features as sitter, subject comment commentator, to suggest that the interweaving voices faces can be useful resist elision seeing knowing on art historians often base their understanding gender sexuality portraiture. As an critic, Lee maintained ambivalent position with regard portraits. Her familiarity new psychology informed response whereby resonance could shift sensorial boundaries genre beyond its function likeness. By engaging interrogation voice portraits, both writing fiction, examines queer attempts challenge authority look identify, define or consume late nineteenth century also saw emergence styles audible articulations self, contemporary representations loquacity may read propositions at time when dominant discourses around ‘female inversion’ ‘speaking woman’ were being fixed by sexologists.