“Amour Dure” was written by “Vernon Lee” and first appeared in Murray’s Magazine (Jan. 1887). “Vernon Lee” was the pseudonym of Violet Paget (1865-1935), a brilliant writer of supernatural fiction. She may not be well-known, but among the cognoscenti of supernatural fiction hers is a name to conjure with.

Spiridion Trepka is a Polish scholar sent to Urbania, in Italy, to write a history of the city. He finds it dull, its natives tedious, and its women repulsive, although his only friend, the son of the Vice Prefect, urges a love affair on him. After all, Spiridion is only twenty-four, and what twenty-four-year-old should be without a love affair? Spiridion’s visions of Italy as it used to be are crushed by its current fallen state. In fact, the only thing that really holds his interest is the story of Medea da Carpi, the Duchess of Stimigliano Orsini and then the wife of Duke Guidalfonso II of Urbania. From 1568 to 1582, starting as a twelve-year-old and then dying as a twenty-seven-year-old, she used lovers and husbands to gain power and then had them murdered, or did the killing herself, to rid herself of them. She was beautiful and manipulative and so frightening that Duke Robert, the priest who eventually defeated her, had her strangled by two infanticides and refused to allow her to be shriven before she died, for fear that she would seduce the priest who would grant her penitence. Duke Robert was so afraid of her, in fact, that after he died he had an image of his soul attached to his statue so that the spirit of Medea could not haunt him and he could sleep peacefully until Judgment Day. Spiridion becomes interested in Medea, looking for portraits of her and then reading letters by her, and his interest becomes fascination and then his fascination becomes an obsession. He begins to see her life from her point of view. He begins singing songs to her. And then he begins to see her, first in his home, in a mirror, standing behind him (it turned out to be a painting of her on the opposite wall, a painting he could not recall seeing before), then in person. He receives a note telling him to meet “a person who knows the interest you bear her”¹ in a church, but when he goes to the church she slips away before he can speak to her. He discovers that the church has been abandoned for months, but he does not care, and he keeps returning to the church, seeing her more frequently, until he receives a letter from her, telling him to destroy the statue of Duke Robert. When he does that, “that night she whom thou lovest will come to reward thy fidelity.”² Spiridion destroys the statue, despite the opposition of the ghosts of Medea’s former lovers, and then waits for Medea to arrive. The end note to the story mentions that Spiridion’s body has been found; he died of a stab wound to the heart, just as some of Medea’s former lovers had.

“Amour Dure” is among the best supernatural tales of the century. The reader knows what Spiridion’s fate is going to be, but Paget sketches his descent into obsession so skillfully that it does not seem predictable, but rather logical and inevitable. There is a psychological plausibility to Spiridion’s fall that is often missing from similar stories. And Paget combines an intimate knowledge of Italian history--she was a noted cultural historian of Italy, her adopted country--with descriptions pitched toward sight, sound, smell and touch, so that “Amour Dure” comes off as a tactile and even lushly described story. It is compelling reading, with a convincing narrative voice and striking images, and the story of Medea, though fictional, reads as if it were taken straight from a story of the Borgias. “Amour Dure” can be read as an inversion of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842), with Spiridion taking the place of the Duchess and Medea standing in for the Duke of Ferrara. Paget may or may not have planned this, but if she did, it would be fitting, considering her passion for Renaissance Italy.

The role of Medea changed from its initial revival in the 1860s to its use in the 1890s:

In these late ﬁn-de-siècle conﬁgurations, Medea’s character undergoes a signiﬁcant, symbolic transformation…the visceral ﬁgure of Medea is removed to the margins and disembodied. Rather than inhabiting the text as a fully realized character, the ‘spirit’ of Medea can be seen to occupy the dark spaces of these texts, ‘haunting’ the narratives….³

Paget in particular puts Medea into a somewhat stereotypical box: “Lee’s Medea is a highly sexualized and heavily mythologized ﬁgure, whose reputation for extraordinary violence is offset by her socio-political victimization.”⁴ But at the same time Paget revels “in the dark, Dionysian side of Victorian Hellenism, inviting the return of the repressed and demonstrating a willingness to readmit that which the dominant culture has ofﬁcially marginalized and rejected.”⁵ Part of this returning “repressed” may have been linked to Paget’s own sexuality; she was a lesbian, and one reading of “Amour Dure” makes Medea da Carpi not just a femme fatale (see: Fatal Woman) but a lesbian femme fatale who uses men but has no interest in them and homicidally disposes of them when she is done with them—and as such perhaps a kind of subconscious wish-fulfillment figure for Paget herself. Critics have wrestled for years with whether or not to apply queer theory readings to Paget’s work;⁶in the case of “Amour Dure,” there seems to be good reason to do so, especially in light of earlier homoerotic ghost stories by Paget like “A Culture-Ghost; or, Winthrop’s Adventure” (Fraser’s Magazine, Jan. 1881).⁷

Medea da Carpi is an immortal femme fatale, and “Amour Dure” is a story that well deserves the title of “classic” and belongs on any short list of the best horror stories of the nineteenth century.

Print: Italo Calvino, ed., Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday. Boston: Mariner Books, 2015.

Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003.

¹ Vernon Lee, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (New York: John Lane, 1906), 38.

² Lee, Hauntings, 50.

³ T.D. Olverson, Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 145.

⁴ Olverson, Women Writers, 146.

⁵ Olverson, Women Writers, 146.

⁶ Mackenzie Brewer Gregg’s “Vernon Lee’s Occult Beauty,” International Journal of Decadence Studies 1, no. 2 (Winter 2018): 17-35, provides a good round-up of the critical arguments about queer readings of Paget’s work.

⁷ See Melissa Edmundson Makala’s Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 80-87.