Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Paget, born in 1856 to British expatriate parents and educated across France, Germany, and Italy. Settled in Florence, she wrote across aesthetics, travel, fiction, music history, and pacifist politics. She was interested in the power of places, landscapes, and art objects to act upon the people who encounter them. Her books include Genius Loci: Notes on Places (1899), The Enchanted Woods and Other Essays on the Genius of Places (1905), The Spirit of Rome (1906), or the seminal Beauty and Ugliness, and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (1912), co-written with Kit Anstruther-Thomson and anticipating by decades what we would now call the neuroscience of art. A committed pacifist, she lost many friendships by opposing the First World War publicly and without apology.