Last week, Smith & Taylor Classics — and imprint of Unnamed Press that publishes underrated gems of classic literature — released two seemingly disparate yet interconnected books: Hauntings by Vernon Lee (originally published in 1890) and The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy (originally published in 1888). Lee and Levy met in Florence in 1886 and were likely lovers, though historical accounts of course sometimes cast them as friends. But the letters between them were full of love and reflections on being writers, and indeed both of their bodies of work teem with queer subtext quite easy for the modern reader to detect.

Smith & Taylor brings current authors together for conversations that close out these classics and deepen their contexts. I was lucky enough to be tapped to be in conversation with horror author Gretchen Felker-Martin for a conversation on Hauntings, a collection of four short stories that in many ways feel as if they could be written today, their distinctly queer horror both timeless and ahead of its time. If you are familiar with Vernon Lee’s work — which will resonate with queer fans of Edgar Allan Poe, Daphne du Maurier, and H. P. Lovecraft — then I hope we have done her justice. And if this is the first time you’re really hearing of Vernon Lee, let us convert you into devout fans. Below is an exclusive excerpt of the conversation Gretchen and I had after reading (or, in Gretchen’s case, re-reading) the stories Hauntings comprises. For the full conversation, pick up a copy of Hauntings.

And be sure to also read our exclusive excerpt of the conversation between Ruth Madievsky and Rachel León about The Romance of a Shop by Vernon Lee’s (probably) girlfriend Amy Levy.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya: I’m curious, Gretchen, what’s your relationship to this book? Have you read it before?

Gretchen Felker-Martin: I’ve read it a couple times. This reread was my first time picking it up in probably a decade, and coming back to it now, especially on the other side of transition and coming out as queer, it feels so much richer. I’m much better able to connect with what’s going on textually and subtextually, because it’s a really gay collection.

KKU: Yes, definitely. I’m actually newer to Vernon Lee’s work, so I’m coming at it from a place of being an out queer person and out queer artist for a while. I was really struck by just how queer it was, and all four stories too. I did a little bit of preliminary research, and a lot of what I read about queerness in Vernon Lee’s work focused on the fourth story, “A Wicked Voice,” but there was so much of it present in every single story in different ways, so that surprised me in the best way. I knew that there was going to be some kind of queer subtext, but it was a much richer and more complex portrayal of queerness than I anticipated.

GFM: Absolutely. Vernon Lee has so much gender anxiety expressed through her characters. There’s this constant litigating of which features are feminine and which features are masculine. It’s reminiscent of transvestigation and phrenology, the pseudoscience from the nineteenth century. There’s such a minute scrutiny of little things, little tics of expressions and differences and features that’s present in all of these stories. The object of horror always has a really, really closely scrutinized face.

KKU: I found that interesting, since a lot of horror veers away from that and avoids making the reader—or the viewer, in the case of film and TV—look a little too closely at the face of horror. But here, it’s embedded in the text that we’re going to analyze what this haunted figure looks like, and also put it in these gendered terms that aren’t playing into expected binaries but complicating and muddying them. At the same time, she was able to hide the queerness. It’s more like, Oh, I’m obsessed with a woman who died three hundred years ago. Oh, I am obsessed with my ancestor, who maybe I am. So many of these characters don’t have traditional heterosexual relationships, especially for the time in which they exist, but she found ways to make it speculative, and that is really cool and ahead of its time.

GFM: That really struck me about “Oke of Okehurst,” not just with Alice but with the nameless painter who’s our narrator, who goes to so much trouble to tell us that he’s definitely not in love with Alice and that he doesn’t like that she’s mean to him and doesn’t think about his feelings at all. He’s constantly interceding in her marriage and extremely fixated on this narcissistic woman who does not look conventionally beautiful, and it feels very like the experience of being the lesbian best friend.

KKU: I think that is my favorite story of the four. I love all of them, but I feel like the layers that we’re talking about when it comes to gender, when it comes to queerness, are so rich and multifaceted in that story in particular. She doesn’t like her husband. She doesn’t even try to hide the fact that she doesn’t like her husband. There’s this idea of gender performance in there. I mean, we have the literal cross-dressing element, but also the party where everyone’s dressing up in these costumes of the past. That’s another interesting through line between all the stories of what it means to be obsessed with the past and living in the past, and how there can be a dangerous side of that.

GFM: There’s a lot of anxiety about antiquity and pre-Christian civilization and scandal and rumor from before the lives of her characters. I agree with you, “Oke of Okehurst” was probably my favorite of the four stories. I thought one fascinating aspect of it was that when her husband is out of his mind and rushing off to shoot the ghost of Lovelock, he shoots his wife, so it’s not just her ancestor she’s embodying, it’s this man whom she is in love with. There’s a lot of that in these stories, a lot of melding of gender identity. In “A Wicked Voice,” the last story, every time Zaffirino shows up, the narrative is consumed with how feminine he is and how beautiful he is, and how angry it makes the protagonist to look at him and see his beauty. It shows a really sophisticated understanding of not just what gender is and what gender roles are, but how people who are outside consideration of these roles react to their violation. You know, people who have never had to think about them because they fit effortlessly, and then suddenly they encounter some sudden breach, and it drives them absolutely crazy.

KKU: What’s fun about that, especially in “A Wicked Voice,” is that there is this gradual wearing down of that binary. When it’s first introduced that Zaffirino has a voice like a woman’s, it’s using that language, and then as you get further in the text, all of a sudden Zaffirino is described as a woman. The “like a woman” is dropped, and the word “woman” is substituted and on its own. That really struck me, because it’s this gradual chipping away at the fallacy of the gender binary over the course of the story. I think that’s also what we see in “Oke of Okehurst,” where at first she’s embodying this woman whom she is related to from generations before, but then her fate is the same fate as that woman’s lover, as this man. The slow degradation of that is very effective. We even see a little bit of that in the first story as well, of trying to figure out that narrator’s obsession with this woman who died three hundred years prior. It’s that element of: Does he want to be the object of her affection? Does he want to be her? That total obsession happens in such a fascinating way that thwarted some of my expectations for how it was going to go. I thought it was just going to be a straightforward femme fatale story, and it was so much more than that.

GFM: Yeah, absolutely. It really surprised me. I remember picking it up, and right at the beginning there’s a couple of full paragraphs about how little interest he has in romance and how he’s never been with a woman, and he doesn’t want to be with a woman, and he has no time for women. It’s so fearful. A lot of her characters are very afraid, and not just because they’re in these horror-adjacent stories, but it seems like they live fearful, anxious lives. It’s fascinating to see her delve into that experience of the world, because the milieu that she’s writing in, Victorian and Edwardian fiction, is a very frightened, anxious body of work. It’s a body of work created by people who are suddenly encountering global society after a century of comfortable, isolated imperialism. The stirrings of what will eventually lead to independence in India have already begun. The American colonies are long independent. The [British] Empire is well and truly crumbling, and as a result, there’s so much fear of the outside world and the past and all these things that are outside of order and Christendom.

KKU: I feel like that is especially at the forefront of the second story, “Dionea.” You have this interruption to comfortable society in the form of a little witch girl. It’s also a very gradual disruption, because she arrives attached to this plank. No one can quite figure it out, and then everything about her is against normal society, but in these strange, unexpected ways. It’s not super obvious. She’s not going around killing a bunch of people or starting a murder cult; she’s just sowing subtle chaos. The way that romance functions in that story is also another interesting instance of a character who sits outside of any conventional, normative idea of heterosexual relations. She never has any relationship, and in this society, that is strange. Everywhere she goes, she seemingly affects people romantically, negatively, but again, in subtle ways. It’s not like these overt love curses. It’s just nothing functions as it’s supposed to when she’s around, right?

GFM: She disrupts the rigid Italian hierarchy around her just by existing. This is another story featuring a man, the sculptor, who says over and over again how uninterested he is in women. He won’t even sculpt women. They’re not fit subjects for sculpture, which was a real and prevalent attitude among sculptors of the period, and just as in so many instances where men get really fixated on masculinity and manliness, incredibly gay. It’s very, very fruity to talk about the peerless body of Apollo that much.

KKU: Absolutely. That was another one where I found myself considering the queer possibilities off the page, in the sense of the receiver of the letters, this Lady Evelyn, who is also really captivated by the idea of this young girl who doesn’t fit into society. I found myself thinking about her a lot, and the doctor referring to her as Evelyn’s protégée. It felt like another clever way of introducing something so subtly against societal expectations or against the norms of the time. I found myself thinking about exactly how Vernon Lee uses narrators and uses the epistolary form in all of these stories, because I think it works so well. There’s something very obviously adjacent to it, the strength of these horror narrators who are living the horror and documenting it in real time in a way that feels tense.

GFM: It’s a wonderful example of the skill that you need to build tension in a nonimmediate medium, which is really something. You have to be able to suggest things that the audience might understand but that the characters can’t. You have to be able to create a sense of imminence and fear even when events are segregated by the date of letters sent. Lady Evelyn is a very interesting character, and there are references in the letters to how she keeps asking about Dionea and how the letter writer, Dr. Alessandro De Rosis, won’t send Dionea to her house.

KKU: I do think that story in particular is such a strong example of how to build that core tension, in that we are so removed from the source of horror in the way that story unfolds. It is being told by this doctor to Lady Evelyn. It’s all word-of-mouth observation. There’s only a few direct interactions between the doctor and Dionea, but those aren’t driving much of the tension. I think that’s a challenging thing to do, and it’s done so impressively in all four of these stories. I mean, I found myself obsessing over the idea in “A Wicked Voice” of sound being the source of horror, but we can’t hear anything. That story snuck up on me, because on my initial read, it was the least scary to me, and then when I reread it, I was like, There’s actually a lot that is very scary happening here. The isolation of that story is also pretty disturbing.

GFM: It reminds me a lot of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, which is an entire novel about a sense that prose can’t explore: smell. One of my favorite books, it’s a tremendous triumph, and I think in large part because it’s constantly grasping for something that, by its own nature, it can’t touch, which is a really poignant register to write in.

KKU: That idea of horror that’s dealing with something that is out of reach of the text itself, something that cannot really be directly confronted, ties into why I like how queerness manifests in this text so much. I’m of the controversial opinion that I often enjoy art that is made “in the closet”—or, in this case, made by someone who could not realize queerness to its full potential, but could privately and also could embed it in art in these ways. I’m almost always more interested in that than art that is more explicitly queer. I know that there’s a big genre of writing that is queer normative, and this idea of making queerness regular and embedded in a society where it’s fully acceptable. That’s great, and if people want that, that’s fine. I’m a lot more interested in this shadow queerness, the queerness that feels almost like a haunting. So what you’re saying about how the horror manifests here, I was like, Oh, that’s how the queerness is too, and that’s why I like it.

GFM: That is absolutely how I felt reading this book, and also, I completely agree with you. I’d much rather sit down and watch Rebecca than I would some modern show about twentysomethings who are talking to each other like they’re in a therapy session.

KKU: I’m glad you brought up Rebecca because I had that in mind as well. The moment of Alice Oke putting on this old dress of her ancestor’s, and this idea of literally wearing these clothes that belong to someone in the past and trying to embody them, especially a tragic, complicated figure. Very Rebecca. There is an eroticism to it. There’s a strangeness to it.

GFM: Even the scene where she appears at the masquerade in the groom’s clothes, that’s almost one-to-one the scene in Rebecca, where the second Mrs. de Winter gets tricked into wearing Rebecca’s dress from a previous masquerade and the whole hall goes silent the minute they see her, just like it happens here. There’s a lot of interesting commonalities between what Lee is doing and what her contemporaries like Daphne du Maurier and even H. P. Lovecraft are doing. They’re both exploring what Arthur Machen explored before them, the sense of going mad from looking at something forbidden. It’s interesting that Lee doesn’t have a bigger scholarly footprint, because having read a good sampling of her work, it seems like she’s tapped into these veins just as deeply, or deeper, than many authors who’ve remained famous over the centuries.

KKU: It’s a weirdly meta phenomenon, because she writes all these characters whose careers fizzle out. I don’t know about you, but I did notice that a through line between all four stories is this idea of not being able to finish work. In the first story, you have the historian who’s completely moved on from this history of Urbania and is not able to finish that work because he becomes so obsessed with this figure from the past. Then the next story, the doctor is working on a book as well and getting sidetracked all the time.

GFM: Right, demurring and saying, Oh, no, I’ll never finish it. Then in “Oke of Okehurst,” you have Alice and the garden play, which the painter knows immediately she’s never going to produce.

KKU: Never going to happen. The painter is also struggling to finish his work. He keeps starting these sketches and can’t get past the preliminary drawings, and then the composer at the end is unable to do his work because he’s so haunted. I was very interested in that creative through line and that probably real anxiety of an artist, of how hard it is to be working on a work in progress and to sometimes feel like you can never see the end.

There’s also this idea in her writing about these big thinkers or creatives who get caught up in their own haunting to the point that they disappear into obscurity or meet a tragic fate, and then considering that Lee has been so erased from these conversations of literature of the time, it’s a sad prophecy there.

Hauntings by Vernon Lee is out from Smith & Taylor Classics now.

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