Oke of Okehurst by Vernon Lee

 

“Then she unlocks the toad’s dire head,
Within whose cell is treasured
That pretious stone, which she doth call
A noble recompence for all,
And to her lar doth it present,
Of his fair aid a monument.”
— from ‘The Toad And Spyder: A Duell’ by Richard Lovelace (the Cavalier poet of the seventeenth century, upon whom Christopher Lovelock is possibly based?)

OKE OF OKEHURST by Vernon Lee

The bullet’s final release. The killing of one’s loved one to love them the more in a more ghostly territory… To play that game of fancy-dress charades to its fullest extent. With half-moon specs of the age?
The toad with its gash in its maniac-brow’s frown of her husband (also her first cousin) whom she leaves behind by having him mad enough to shoot her. Her second miscarriage of self?
You need to read this famous attritional Gothic house novelette for yourself, in order to appreciate its relentless description of Alice Oke, not just the glimpse of her at the beginning of the above Sorworth story, where the gash in the brow of her saviour in this Paget work was there a crack in the back of his head! So, yes, not just a telling glimpse or impression, but teems and teems of teasing tantalisations of her, borrowing the attritionally descriptive effects in the above Clarimonde. Suffering endless boredoms of such heartfelt samenesses, now reaching for a fulfilling apotheosis of self.
Much of her husband adumbrated, too, with his own conflicting traits, obsessionally couched by both the narrator in cahoots with his creator the author Violet Paget masquerading as Vernon Lee.
Here the Angel and Jacob wrestling duel is explicitly mentioned, and it seems to be the same one as at the end of the Sorworth story, if there it was on a rooftop.
Many tantalising qualities imparted by the Alice-obsessed narrator about her, the man who was her would-be portrait painter invited to thus capture her by the husband, long paragraph after long paragraph of obsessional but beautifully textured samenesses of traits. A self-projected Narcissus complex.
The writer Violet Paget now a version of Virgil Pomfret? A woman as man transcending the mad-woman she had created. Not forgetting the gratuitously pervasive yellow of the drawing-room….as a co-instinctive symbol of such feminist release?
To transcend the immortal nullity in the Sinclair? Leigh to Lee.

Full Context  of above: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/12/27614/