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Oke of Oakhurst by Vernon LeeVernon LeeDespite sounding so masculine, Vernon Lee was actually a woman called Violet Paget, born in France in 1856 and died in Italy in 1935. Despite these location she identified as English.\xa0Her biographer Vineta Colby says that Lee was English by nationality, French by an accident of birth and Italian by choice.As well as the ghost stories for which she is most famous, Vernon Lee, was an essayist who wrote about travel and art and especially aesthetics.\xa0Her parents were globe-trotting, or at least Europe-trotting intellectuals and in 1873, when Vernon or Violet was 17, they settled in Florence Italy. She stayed living in the vicinity of Florence until her death in 1935.Violet published her first collection of essays when she was 24. These dealt with Italian writers and dramatists and she later wrote on William Shakespeare and Renaissance Italy.\xa0She made fun of English artists, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites in her 1884 novel Mrs Brown.Politically, she was a convinced pacificst. She published under a masculine name because she feared that as a woman her writing would not be taken seriously.\xa0She was a feminist and mostly dressed as a man.\xa0Though she didn\u2019t come out, she did have crushes on women and was probably Lesbian. She suffered from health anxiety.She also fell out with other writers by making fun of them in her work; notably Henry James and Edith Wharton.Henry James wrote to his equally talented brother William warning him about Vernon Lee: the most able mind in Florence, \u2018as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent.\u2019Oke of OakhurstIn Part 1, the story begins with our narrator, the artist, talking to an unknown interlocutor about a painting assignment he had. He begins to talk about the wonderful and strange Mrs Alice Oke of Oakhurst, Kent.\xa0We learn that the stay with the Okes left an indelible impression on the painter, whose name I have not yet learned.We get the impression that the Okes are gone, possibly dead. Certainly, he will never be able to paint her. Some disaster has fallen. The painter painted the husband and the wife and he has no idea who know owns the portrait of Mr Oke. This suggests their home has been broken up as if in some terrible fate has befallen them.He didn\u2019t even finish the portrait of Mrs Oke.\xa0Vernon Lee withholds information to whet our appetite. She creates suspense.\u201cI suppose the newspapers were full of it at the time.\u201dSo it was a scandal.\xa0\u201cIt really was stranger than anyone could have guessed.\u201d\xa0Alice Oke is dead and her end was strange, but fitting. Lee tantalises us all the way. \xa0She was sent to our painter from heaven, \u201cor the other place.\u201dWho is this woman!?? I want to know.The narrator doesn\u2019t normally retell the story, but luckily for us, he chooses to on this occasion.Lee paints a very sympathetic picture of Mr Oke, very much in awe of his wife, but a decent sort and not without feelings and sensitivities.\xa0But she sets him up through the painter\u2019s eyes as the very antithesis of what the London Bohemian painter would admire.\xa0The painter sets off presuming Oke is the dullest of the dull, the very pinnacle of boring Tory county life.He had been a lieutenant in the Blues which is a nickname of the Royal Horseguards, a prestigious cavalry regiment in the British Army who had been, as its name suggests a royal bodyguard.In part 2 we get the background to Mr Oke. The painter is very disparaging. He portrays Oke as a dull young Kentish Tory with no imagination and no style.\xa0He refers to him as a \u2018squireen\u2019 (which my spellcheck prefers to render as \u2018squirrel\u2019) I guess this is a pejorative diminutive of \u2018squire\u2019 with the Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices