No full account of Lee's writing or any retrospective assessment of her influence on English letters would be complete without an examination of some of her more controversial and groundbreaking works such as her collaborative research into ‘psychological aesthetics’ and her two pacifist pieces The Ballet of the Nations (1915) and Satan the Waster (1920). This chapter opens with an account of the novel, if somewhat eccentric, research that Lee began in the late 1880s with her companion Kit Anstruther-Thomson into the psychological and physiological effects of art. It then explores how the events of the First World War came to politicize Lee's cosmopolitan identity and triggered a change of direction in both her writing and its public reception. And here, we examine the public censure that Lee faced (from H.G. Wells amongst others) for refusing to blame German imperial ambitions alone for the war and how she, in turn, bravely sought to explain her deeply unpopular and avowedly unpatriotic stance in the two anti-war works she wrote. Finally, the study concludes with a reading of Lee's quasi-empirical treatise on the art of good writing The Handling of Words (1923) for the revealing insight that it offers into her efforts to adapt to the changing world of twentieth-century letters. In The Handling of Words, we see Lee express both her frustration at what she believed to be the degraded literary tastes of post-war audiences and also unexpectedly reveal a sympathetic understanding of the upcoming generation of Modernist writers and their desire to produce experimental, visceral and confrontational works.

PSYCHOLOGICAL AESTHETICS

As we saw in chapter 1, Lee closed the 1895 valedictory to Walter Pater that appeared in Renaissance Fancies and Studies by pledging herself memorably to ‘art, not for art's sake, but art for the sake of life - art as one of the harmonious functions of existence’ (RFS, 259). Here, we see Lee not only bid a final farewell to the aestheticism of her youth but, more importantly, publicly announce her desire to discover a socially productive and practical role that art could play in life.