Eugene Lee-Hamilton

Abstract

Born in London, England, Eugene Jacob Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907) carved out a life for himself as a poet after a severe, stress-induced paralysis signaled the end of his career as a diplomat in 1873 at the age of twenty-eight. He was educated in early life in France and Germany, subsequently attending but failing to graduate from Oxford and then working for the Foreign Office. Correspondence between Lee-Hamilton and his mother, beginning when he entered Oxford in 1864 and continuing when his diplomatic career began in 1869, forecasts his neurological collapse, which was later diagnosed as a self-induced reaction to stress. His recovery twenty years later was due in large part to his recognition that he might “will” himself to recover. During his extended state of paralysis, Lee-Hamilton lived in Florence with his mother and his half-sister, Violet Paget, the writer known as Vernon Lee. Lee-Hamilton was so ill that his mother and sister had to transcribe the poetry he dictated. Although he published seven books of poetry, which included lyric and dramatic poems, during his illness, he became known mainly for his Petrarchan sonnets. The New Medusa and Apollo and Marsyas, published in 1882 and 1884, respectively, successfully draw on his extensive knowledge of history and art, but he is best known for his seventh book of poetry, the autobiographical Sonnets of the Wingless Hours, the collection that depicts his illness and his recovery. By the time the volume was published in 1894, he had emerged from his neurasthenic paralysis after treatment by an eminent German neurologist, and he went on to travel in the United States and Canada. In 1898 he married the novelist and editor Annie Holdsworth and fathered a daughter who lived only two years and whose death inspired the sonnet sequence Mimma Bella. Although Lee-Hamilton and his wife published poetry and fiction together and he began a translation of Dante’s Inferno, his work was not received as well as it had been before his recovery from neurasthenia, and those who knew him accepted that once the link between his illness and his poetic talents no longer existed, the talents themselves seem to have waned. After a series of health catastrophes brought on in part by his daughter’s death, he died in Italy in 1907. His widow published Mimma Bella in 1908.