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The Eunuch in Lee’s ‘Virgin of the Seven Daggers’
An 1889 ghost story with Don Juan as tomb raider
The British writer Vernon Lee, whose real name was Violet Paget, wrote the story “The Virgin of the Seven Daggers” in 1889. You can find it on pp. 190–222 in this 2004 version from Dufour Editions, readable on Archive.org.
Lee had been involved with the poet Mary Robinson, but a difficulty in their relationship in 1888 upset her, and she traveled to southern Spain to recover. Encountering the Spanish Catholic aesthetic, Lee felt it was grotesque, and she wrote this short fiction perhaps to process her feelings about it in the way that certain confusions are processed in daydreams, as suggested by Leire Barrera-Medrano, after Freud.
The tale is a campy, ironic ghost story featuring the famously womanizing character of Don Juan. (A more famous Don Juan story is Lord Byron’s poem, written 1819–1824.) Lee’s story includes stereotypical portraits of a Jew and a sultan’s eunuch. I’m interested in fictional portrayals of eunuchs, especially evil ones, and this story illuminates that stereotype.
The Church
This story centers on a “yellow free-stone Church of Our Lady of the Seven Daggers” in Grenada (that’s the author’s spelling), described as an example of the 17th-century…
