Sally Blackburn-Daniels

Teesside University

Author, essayist and lady of letters, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget 1856-1935), began her writing career as a self-proclaimed cosmopolitan. As a member of the well-travelled, well-read, liberal intelligentsia, ‘A Cosmopolitan’ became an apt way for her to sign off on letters. Yet Lee’s relationship with the term was incredibly complex, and was put aside...

Considering the importance of the influence of psychologists Ewald Hering and Richard Semon upon Vernon Lee, and drawing upon the materials at the Harold Acton archive, this essay claims that for Lee, an avid writer of marginalia, the text becomes both the stimulus for production of memory and the palimpsestic site of mnemic potentiality. This essa...

A call for papers for 'The Future of Intelligence: A Multidisciplinary Vernon Lee Conference' 8-10 September 2023, organised by Sally Blackburn-Daniels (Teesside University, UK), Shafquat Towheed (The Open University, UK), Associazione Culturale Il Palmerino, and the International Vernon Lee Society.

'From Crystal Palace to the Grand-Guignol: Vernon Lee and the First World War' in Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 5.2 (2022), 40-62.

Introduction to special issue on Vernon Lee by Patricia Pulham and Sally Blackburn-Daniels, ‘Vernon Lee: Decadence, Morality and Interart Aestheticism’ in Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies. https://journals.gold.ac.uk/index.php/volupte/article/view/1676

Conference poster for 'Vernon Lee, Aesthetics and Empathy', 12-13 September, 2022.

Events curated by the Il Palmerino Cultural Association, as part of the 'Estate Fiorentino' summertime programme 2022. It is co-funded by the European Union's European Social Fund, within the framework of the "Operational Programme for Metropolitan Cities 2014-2020". The events are created in collaboration with the Impermanence Company, Gada Playho...

This chapter has six sections: 1. General and Prose, including Dickens; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Periodicals, Publishing History; 5. Miscellaneous; 6. Drama. Section 1 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 2 is by Lois Burke and Fiona Snailham; section 3 is by Sally Blackburn-Daniels; section 4 is by Heather Hind; sections 5 and 6 are by William Baker...

During the COVID-19 pandemic Twitter became for many a way of communicating. For those of us with more library cards than credit cards, and a hefty TBR (to be read) pile at home the lockdown could have been paradisiacal. As lockdown forced bookshop doors shut, the social media platform became a site to share news of independent businesses in need,...

Okehurst – the stately home in Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst; Or, The Phantom Lover” – is the epitome of English architecture, dating back to “Norman or Saxon” times. Yet inside, the house is populated with far-flung objects and traces of the exotic: Persian rugs, majolica ornaments, and “rose-leaves and spices put into china bowls.” The house and...

This chapter has five sections: 1. General and Prose, including Dickens; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Periodicals, Publishing History, and Drama; 5. Miscellaneous. Section 1 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 2 is by Lois Burke; section 3 is by Sally Blackburn-Daniels; sections 4 and 5 are by William Baker. In somewhat of a departure from previous acco...

This contribution extends the discussion of the types and uses of links bootstrapped by Mason and Bernstein\'s “On Links: Exercises in Style”, focusing on how authors use marginalia and annotations as links to the future. We argue that the development of a common semantics of “links to be” is needed in order to systematise individual authorial prac...

This poster presents the aims of my thesis, which are to: -engage with late nineteenth, and early twentieth-century scientific discourse—as suggested by the British Institute archive—and to attempt to find the traces of these movements in the work of Vernon Lee -create a reading list for Lee that goes beyond the archive at the British Institute - p...

This project examines Vernon Lee’s (1856-1935) assimilation of contemporary models of scientific theory into her own textual output. It does so by bringing attention to Lee’s writing practice as a development of her own understanding of the scientific theory of the mneme, and furthermore, the way in which this understanding then became a framework...