Dwelling with Birds in Vernon Lee's Essays

Focusing on a selection of travel essays written between 1880 and 1925, this chapter examines Vernon Lee’s eco-cosmopolitan approach to the environment. After examining Lee’s phenomenological description of landscape in light of recent critical work in new materialism, this study considers the author’s little-known essays on birds, in order to show how birds and flight shape Lee’s environmental perception and imaginary, inflecting her meditations on the human condition and national cultures, her experience of modern modes of locomotion, her understanding of modern consciousness, and the form of her essays. By emphasising responsiveness and relationality in close encounters between the individual and the natural world, Lee’s environmentally oriented essays gesture towards the post-human and celebrate relationships of resonance, while experimenting with new topographies of essayistic writing at the fin de siècle .