Perfumed Melodies, Violet Memories

This chapter focuses on the fragrance of single flower—the violet—which although often associated with the modest Victorian maiden, has an alternative literary genealogy that links its scent not just to memory, death, mourning, and remembrance, but also specifically to music and poetry. After tracking its influential literary origins in Shakespeare and Bacon, the chapter shows how violet scent encrypts memories of Shelley and Keats that haunt the Victorian imagination, and traces that memorial scent as it permeates various later Victorian lyrics to be finally expressed in a sonnet of 1901 by Katharine Bradley, the older half of the poetic couple who write as Michael Field.