"Receive from me a word of warning about Vernon Lee. my reasons are several, and too complicated, some of them, to go into, but one of them is that she has lately, as I am told [in a volume of tales called Vanitas, which I haven't read] directed a sort of satire of a flagrant and markedly 'saucy' kind at me [!!] - exactly the sort of thing she has done to others [her books - fiction - are a tissue of personalities of the hideous roman-a-clef kind] and of a particularly impudent and blackguardly sort of thing to a friend and one who has treated her with such such particular consideration as I have.
"... she is as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent - which is saying a great deal. Her vigour and sweep of intellect are most rare and her talk superior altogether, but I don't agree with you at all about her 'style', which I find insupportable, and I find also that she breaks down in her books.. There is a great second-rateness in her first-rateness.... At any rate, draw it mild with her on the question of friendship. She's a tiger-cat!"
to William James 1893
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