Voicing the queer self: listening to portraits with Vernon Lee

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