Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
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Leeds Cultural Conversations - Vernon Lee
Delivering the third talk in the 2019/20 Leeds Cultural Conversations series in February, Ruth Robbins talked about the fin-de-siecle writer Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) and how she used the genre conventions of the ghost story to speak of desires that in her own time had very little visibility.
The lesbian is a figure who has been marginalised and even erased from literary history. Unlike the much more visible gay man, strategies for representing female same-sex desires are considerably more coded and covert.
In Lee’s work the lesbian ghost is fleeting – now you see her, now you don’t. But the very fact of her appearance expresses the will to be both seen and heard. The work of recovering that story is an important part of lesbian literary history.
This event took place during LGBTQ History Month and was part of the Leeds Cultural Conversations series organised by the Centre for Culture and the Arts at Leeds Beckett University.
Professor Ruth Robbins
Ruth Robbins is Professor in English Literature and Director of Research for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. She has a wide range of research interests which span the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
