Vernon Lee

The Countess of Albany Vernon Lee

Publisher Marketing: In preparing this volume on the Countess of Albany (which I consider as a kind of completion of my previous studies of eighteenth-century Italy), I have availed myself largely of Baron Alfred von Reumont's large work Die Grafin von Albany (published in 1862); and of the monograph, itself partially founded on the foregoing, of M. St. Rene Taillandier, entitled La Comtesse d'Albany, published in Paris in 1862. Baron von Reumont's two volumes, written twenty years ago and when the generation which had come into personal contact with the Countess of Albany had not yet entirely died out; and M. St. Rene Taillandier's volume, which embodied the result of his researches into the archives of the Musee Fabre at Montpellier; might naturally be expected to have exhausted all the information obtainable about the subject of their and my studies. This has proved to be the case very much less than might have been anticipated. The publication, by Jacopo Bernardi and Carlo Milanesi, of a number of letters of Alfieri to Sienese friends, has afforded me an insight into Alfieri's character and his relations with the Countess of Albany such as was unattainable to Baron von Reumont and to M. St. Rene Taillandier.