Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture 9781409405894, 9781409405900, 9781472404787, 2013012946

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Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture

‘Ouida,’ the pseudonym of Louise Ramé (1839–1908), was one of the most productive, widely-circulated and adapted of Victorian popular novelists, with a readership that ranged from Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde and Ruskin to the nameless newspaper readers and subscribers to lending libraries. Examining the range and variety of Ouida’s literary output, which includes journalism as well as fiction, reveals her to be both a literary seismometer, sensitive to the enormous shifts in taste and publication practices of the second half of the nineteenth century, and a fierce protector of her independent vision. This collection offers a radically new view of Ouida, helping us thereby to rethink our perceptions of popular women writers in general, theatrical adaptation of their fiction, and their engagements with imperialism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The volume's usefulness to scholars is enhanced by new bibliographies of Ouida’s fiction and journalism as well as of British stage adaptations of her work.

The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture

Edited by Jane Jordan Kingston University, UK and Andrew King University of Greenwich, UK

© Jane Jordan and Andrew King and contributors 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Jane Jordan and Andrew King have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company 110 Cherry Street Wey Court East Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ouida and Victorian popular culture / edited by Jane Jordan and Andrew King. pages cm.—(The Nineteenth Century Series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0589-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4094-0590-0 (ebook)— ISBN 978-1-4724-0478-7 (epub) 1. Ouida, 1839–1908—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Literature and society—England— History—19th century. I. Jordan, Jane, 1964– editor of compilation. II. King, Andrew, 1957– editor of compilation. PR4528.O94 2013 823’.8—dc23 2013012946 ISBN 9781409405894 (hbk) ISBN 9781409405900 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 9781472404787 (ebk – ePUB)

IV

Contents List of Illustrations   Notes on Contributors   Acknowledgements   Introduction   Andrew King

vii ix xiii 1

Part I Rereading Ouida 1 Ouida 1839–1908: Quantities, Aesthetics, Politics   Andrew King 2 Ouida and the Canon: Recovering, Reconsidering, and Revisioning the Popular   Pamela K. Gilbert 3 ‘Between Men’: Romantic Friendship in Ouida’s Early Novels   Jane Jordan

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37 53

PART II Rewriting Ouida 4 ‘A hack as harmful as he is brainless and, one, moreover, who stabs where he steals.’ Ouida, the Victorian Adaptor and Moths  73 Hayley Jayne Bradley 5 Ouida, Vernon Lee and the Aesthetic Novel   Sondeep Kandola 6 Defending Female Genius: The Unlikely Cultural Alignment of Marie Corelli and Ouida   Nickianne Moody Part III

93

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Ouida and Politics

7 Ouida and the Russians: Aristocratic Francophilia to Tolstoyism   Diana Maltz

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8 Opinionated Ouida   Lyn Pykett

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9 Politicizing the Aesthetic:Ouida’s Transnational Critique of Modernity   Richard Ambrosini

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Appendix 1: Ouida: Novels and Other Volume Form Publications   Appendix 2: Ouida: Journalism (A Select Bibliography)   Appendix 3: British Theatrical Adaptations of Ouida’s Novels  

183 191 193

Bibliography   Index  

215 229

List of Illustrations I.1 Ouida, Ogden’s Guinea Cigarette Cards 93 (issued in 1901), based on a photographic portrait by Elliott & Fry, Baker Street, London, 1886–87

xiv

1.1

Frontispiece from Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos selected from the Works of Ouida by F. Sidney Morris (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1884): engraving by Illman brothers from an original photograph by Adolphe Beau, Regent Street, London, dating from Ouida’s sojourn at the Langham Hotel (1867–71), with Ouida’s signature

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2.1

A Village Commune, cover, Chatto & Windus, 2 shilling yellowback, 1882

36

3.1

Under Two Flags, cover, Chatto & Windus 6th edition, 1898

52

4.1

Internal pages of programme for the adaptation of Ouida’s Moths by Henry Hamilton at the Olympic Theatre, London, April, 1882

72

5.1

Ariadnê (1877), cover, Chatto & Windus, 2 shilling yellowback, 1888

92

6.1

‘“Ouida.” Punch’s Fancy Portraits no 45, Punch, 20 August 1881, p. 83

108

7.1

Othmar, cover, Chatto & Windus, 2 shilling yellowback, 1887

130

8.1

Critical Studies, title page, Fisher Unwin, 1900

146

9.1

Pascarello, cover, trans. ‘Diana D’Arco’ [Enrico Montazio] (Firenze: Banco d’Annunzi Commissioni e Rappreseentanze), vol. 1 of 3, 1 lira octavo paperback

164

i,

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Notes on Contributors Richard Ambrosini, Professor of English Literature in the Department of International Studies at Università di Roma 3, has published essays on a variety of subjects from Shakespeare to Graham Greene, through Coleridge, Kipling and F. M. Crawford, but has mostly focused his work on Joseph Conrad (Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse [1991, 2008] and Introduzione a Conrad [1991]) and Robert Louis Stevenson, the subject of his book R. L. Stevenson: la poetica del romanzo (2001) and of two collections edited with Richard Dury: Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries (2006) and European Stevenson (2009). He has published several Italian translations of these two authors’ novels, most recently of The Beach of Falesá (2011) and of Chance (2013). Recent publications in Italian include essays on the 1950 UNESCO ‘Statement on Race,’ the European novel from 1900 to 1925, and the political ambiguities of the terms ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘postcolonial.’ Hayley Jayne Bradley recently completed her PhD, entitled A Theatrical Artisan: Henry Hamilton and British Drama 1870–1918 at the University of Manchester. She is the membership secretary for TaPRA (Theatre and Practitioners Research Association) and has worked as a research assistant on Maggie B. Gale and John F. Deeney’s edited volume Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance (Routledge, 2010) and Plays and Performance Texts By Women, 1880–1930, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Gilli Bush-Bailey (Manchester University Press, 2012). Her major research interest is late nineteenth / early twentieth century theatre history. Pamela K. Gilbert is Albert Brick Professor of English at the University of Florida. She has published widely in the areas of Victorian literature, cultural studies and the history of medicine. Her books are Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge, 1997), Mapping the Victorian Social Body (SUNY, 2004), The Citizen’s Body (Ohio State, 2007), and Cholera and Nation (SUNY, 2008). She has edited a collection entitled Imagined Londons (SUNY Press, 2002), and co-edited Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (SUNY Press, 1999, with Marlene Tromp and Aeron Haynie). She has also edited a teaching and scholarly edition of Rhoda Broughton’s novel, Cometh Up as a Flower (Broadview Press, 2010), and has most recently been the editor of the Companion to Sensation Fiction (Blackwell, 2011). Jane Jordan is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University and co‑founder of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association. The author of two biographies, Josephine Butler (2001) and Kitty O’Shea (2005), Jane’s current project is a literary biography of the Victorian popular novelist, Ouida. She has published essays on Ouida in A Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011),

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A Return to the Common Reader (2011), The Victorians and Italy (2009), Life Writing (2009), Anglistica Pisana (2009), and has contributed an article on Ouida and literary censorship to a special issue of Women’s Writing, ‘Beyond Braddon: Forgotten Female Sensationalists’, edited by Anne-Marie Beller and Tara MacDonald (20:2, 2013). Sondeep Kandola is a Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University and is the author of Vernon Lee (2011) for the ‘Writers and their Works’ series. She has published articles on Vernon Lee and the culture of the fin de siècle and is currently working on her monograph The Art of Union: Gothic Writing and the Formation of the United Kingdom which will be published by Manchester University Press in 2013. Andrew King is Professor of English Literature and Literary Studies at the University of Greenwich. He is the author of The London Journal: Periodicals, Production and Gender 1845–1880 (2004) and Victorian Print Media (with John Plunkett, 2005) along with other books and articles on Victorian print culture, on media history and on cultural studies. He was Associate Editor of the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (2009) to which he contributed around 70 items and has edited various special numbers of journals on topics as diverse as ‘Angels and Demons’, ‘Work and Leisure’ and ‘Gender, the Professions and the Press’. In 2011 he edited Ouida’s The Massarenes for Pickering and Chatto and has published several journal pieces on Ouida and her contexts. He is currently working on the Ashgate Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and on a full-length biography of Ouida. Diana Maltz is a Professor of English at Southern Oregon University, where she also serves as Chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Philosophy. Her book, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes: Beauty for the People, 1870–1900, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006. She is currently editing Arthur Morrison’s 1896 slum novel, A Child of the Jago, for Broadview Press. She is also pursuing a study of British novelists and their engagements with counter-cultural, ‘new age’ lifestyles at the fin de siècle. Nickianne Moody is Head of Department and a Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the founder of the Association of Research in Popular Fictions and General Editor of the journal Popular Narrative Media. Recent publications include Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Debates for the Twenty-first Century (Liverpool, 2005, with Clare Horrocks), and ‘Moral Uncertainty and the Afterlife: Explaining the Popularity of Marie Corelli’s Early Novels’, Women’s Writing (June 2006). Lyn Pykett, Professor Emerita in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, has published widely on nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury literature and culture. Her books include, Emily Bronte (1989), The Improper

Notes on Contributors

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Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992), The Sensation Novel from ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone (1994), Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (1995), Charles Dickens (2002) and Wilkie Collins (2005). Recent publications include a chapter on Dickens in the nineteenth-century volume of the Oxford History of the English Novel, a new edition of Lady Audley’s Secret (Oxford World’s Classics, 2012), and The NineteenthCentury Sensation Novel (an expanded and updated version of her 1994 book on the sensation novel in ‘The Writers and Their Works’ series).

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Acknowledgements The editors would like to extend their heartfelt thanks to Ann Donahue of Ashgate and to all the contributors to this volume for their forbearance and their lasting faith in the project. Andrew would also like to thank the Marchese Bernardo, the Marchesa Nicoletta and the Marchesa Olivella Pianetti Lotteringhi della Stufa for their hospitality at their wonderful castle of Calcione in Tuscany, where they generously furnished him with information about their relative, Ouida’s beloved Lotario Lottaringo Lotteringhi della Stufa.

Fig. I.1

Ouida, Ogden’s Guinea Cigarette Cards 93 (issued in 1901), based on a photographic portrait by Elliott & Fry, Baker Street, London, 1886–87

Introduction Andrew King

That Ouida is a crucial figure in Victorian popular culture is hard to dispute. Yet Ouida herself might well have argued with that. For at least the last two decades of her life, she would have hated being connected to the ‘Victorian.’ She spent less than half of her life in England under Victoria and came to hate an Empress who supported the Boer war. She claimed in response to her award of a small Civil List pension in 1906 that she did ‘not approve of this kind of gift and [did] not think [she had] done England any service.’1 From her first work in the 1860s, she created worlds whose values were very far from what was once considered the Victorian norms of bourgeois sexual regularity and conviction in the goodness of prudence and profit. While she may have shifted a lot of copy as a generator of entertaining stories, Ouida herself came to disdain popularity in that sense. She hated the culture of celebrity. Certainly from the 1880s and probably earlier she believed in the value of the individual genius who could intervene in society and change it for the better. She had to sell the produce of her pen in order to live, true, but she was only really in favour of being ‘popular’ if it meant being listened to and taken seriously by a large number of people. She refused the logic of ‘loser wins’ that Pierre Bourdieu suggested came to govern the cultural field in the nineteenth century whereby status was conferred in inverse proportion to popularity.2 Neither was hers a popular politics in the sense that it stemmed from the ‘people’; instead, she advocated a politics of aristocracy – a rule by the ‘best’ who comprised a combination of feudal aristocracy and cultural leaders. Ouida’s cultural penetration was nonetheless remarkable. Sales of her work are even supposed to have subvented Chatto & Windus’s publication of new writers as late as the 1930s.3 Ouida’s heterogeneous audience embraced William Powell Frith, Oscar Wilde, G.S. Street, Max Beerbohm, Tennyson, Letter from Ouida to Macmillan, 25 July 1906, BL Add MSS 54964. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity

1 2

Press, 1996). 3 For publication figures, see Celia Phillips, ‘Ouida and her Publishers: 1874–1880,’ Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 81.2 (1978), 210–15 and especially Jane Jordan, The Writings of ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée), PhD Birkbeck College, University of London, and ‘Ouida. The Enigma of a Literary Identity’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 57 (Autumn 1995), 75–105. Alexis Weedon used Ouida’s writing as a case study to illustrate publishing strategies from the 1870s to the 1930s and offers some figures for Under Two Flags, Strathmore and Held in Bondage: see Victorian Publishing: the Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market 1836–1916 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003), ch. 6.

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Arnold Bennett, Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, the Italian royal family, aristocratic society hostesses, Norman Douglas and Anthony Powell (like Beerbohm, a great admirer of the ‘vitality,’ if not the form, of her plots4) as well as the now nameless subscribers to lending libraries, purchasers of two shilling yellow backs, readers of Bentley’s Miscellany, Lippincott’s, the Graphic, the Illustrated London News, the Contemporary Review and many other newspapers and periodicals. Ouida was the only woman amongst the male writers preferred by the pre-WWI ‘fourpenny professors’ – elderly Lanarkshire miners – whose reading is discussed by Jonathan Rose.5 Her reach was global. Not only did she publish in English in Britain, the US and on the Continent, but she was translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Dutch, Finnish, Russian and Japanese.6 Ouida’s name and life – despite her opposition to the growing culture of celebrity – were raided and redefined to produce copy and meanings far beyond her control. Besides a ‘Ouida’ march for banjo orchestra, besides many racehorses and a South African mining enterprise named after her (the latter she strongly objected to)7, besides the plays and operas and parodies based on her fiction,8 besides the reviews of her work and the influence of her style,9 gossip about her appeared in newspapers and periodicals in which her work itself was never published. In the early twentieth century, there were at least 22 film versions of her works, animé versions of ‘A Dog of Flanders’ being still well known in Japan.10 4 See Powell’s ‘Introduction’ to Novels of High Society from the Victorian Age (London: The Pilot Press, 1947), p. xii. 5 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 119–20. 6 A bibliography of Ouida, which includes translations, can be found at the Victorian Fiction Research Guides at Victorian Secrets (http://www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/victorianfiction-research-guides/). 7 Letter to Times, ‘Ouida Prospecting Syndicate’, 6 March 1891, p. 12. 8 On English-language stage adaptations, see Bradley below. No work has appeared on the five operatic versions of Ouida’s work apart from Cesare Orselli’s ‘Vicende operistiche di Due zoccoletti’, Anglistica Pisana, 6.1/2 (2009), 25–36, which focusses on Mascagni’s Lodoletta (1917). Other operas include Frederick Hymen Cowen’s Signa (1893–94), Sir Jenö Hubay’s Moharózsa (1903), Edmond Missa’s Muguette (1903) and Jan van den Eeden’s Rhena (1912). 9 Talia Schaffer’s work remains fundamental for demonstrating Ouida’s stylistic influence on the fin de siècle and is cited by several contributors below: see The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville: Virginia Univeristy Press, 2000), ch. 4, and ‘The Origins of the Aesthetic Novel: Ouida, Wilde, and the Popular Romance’, in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 212–29. 10 For an account of the film versions, see both Giacomo Manzoli, ‘Dal Letterario al filmico: la (relativa) fortuna cinematografica delle opera di Ouida,’ Anglistica Pisana 6.1/2 (2009), 45–51 and Didier Volckaert, ‘Dog of Flanders in Cinema and Animé’ in ‘Dog of Flanders’. Een nooit geziene kijk op Vlaanderen, eds An van Dienderen and Didier

Introduction

3

Yet Ouida has fallen out of favour with the general public since the 1930s, a fate typical of nineteenth-century popular writing. Sales of her novels might have tailed off even more before the 1930s had there not been a boost from the 1936 film adaptation of Under Two Flags staring Claudette Colbert and Ronald Colman. Her lack of popularity for the last eight decades has not been aided by the particularity of her politics and aesthetics. She may have been hailed by Talia Schaffer as a ‘forgotten mother’ of the 1890s aesthetic movement but she is also widely regarded as a misogynist anti-feminist. Ouida coined the term ‘the New Woman’ but Pamela Gilbert, in an exceptionally perceptive essay, remarked that Ouida’s hostility towards the New Woman ‘combined with stylistic extravagance, has contributed to render Ouida invisible within today’s canon, in which she can be classified neither as canonical nor as a feminist foremother.’11 Yet, paradoxically, Ouida is well known by her opponents and supporters alike as a proponent of sexual transgression and a troubled explorer of gender who deals with same-sex love, sado-masochism, extramarital relations and domestic violence. Belittling Ouida became a reflex in the early twentieth century, a consolidation of the critical attacks she had endured throughout her literary life. Her Times obituary saw fit to damn her as offering nothing more than a ‘schoolgirl’s dream’ from first to last and Queenie Leavis, Malcolm Elwin and Rose Macaulay would elaborate on that in the ensuing decades.12 Henry James described Ouida as ‘a little terrible and pathetic grotesque’ in a letter to Elizabeth Lee, her first biographer,13 and he had earlier parodied her as Mrs Stormer in his 1892 short story ‘Greville Fane’ (Mrs Stormer’s pseudonym).14 Mrs Stormer epitomizes the idea of the Volckaert (Tielt: Lannoo, 2010), 3–17. According to Anne Marie Van Broeck and Ilse De Gruyter (‘Japans toerisme in Antwerpen en Vlaanderen in cijfers’ in van Dienderen and Volckaert, Dog, 105–8), one in four tourists in Antwerp Cathedral is Japanese. They apparently come to visit the location of the heroes’ deaths. Much of the material of the book had been used in an ironic film documentary by the editors, Patrasche, a Dog of Flanders – Made in Japan (Belgium, 2007, dir. Didier Volckaert and An van Dienderen). 11 Pamela Gilbert, ‘Ouida and the Other New Woman’, in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Diane Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 170–88, p. 170. 12 The Times, 27 January, 1908, p. 7. Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Pimlico 2000 / 1932); Malcolm Elwin, Victorian Wallflowers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934) pp. 282–312; Rose Macaulay, ‘Eccentric Englishwomen. IV. Ouida,’ Spectator, 13 May 1937, pp. 855–6. Carl van Vechten’s defence of Ouida in Excavations: A Book of Advocacies (New York, Alfred Knopff, 1926), pp. 47–64 is a deliberately provocative exception. 13 BL MS. Add. 41340 f. 125, letter to Elizabeth Lee, dated 10 February 1913. 14 Adeline Tintner, The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James: An Intertextual Study ([Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1991], pp. 10–12) has most thoroughly made the identification of Ouida and Greville Fane, having begun the exploration of Ouida’s influence on Henry James. Nigel Cross had, however, previously made the identification: see The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 186.

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popular novelist in terms of the quantity she churned out, her conservative politics and her passion-driven, irrational aesthetics. Writing ‘only from the elbow down’ Mrs Stormer had a shrewd perception that form, in prose at least, never recommended anyone to the public. With no more prejudices than an old sausage mill, she would give forth again and again with patient punctuality any poor verbal scrap that had been dropped into her.15

Mrs Stormer (or Ouida) is a snobbish, prolific, passionate nonsense (to name her a paradox would dignify her), whose version of reality – for all her claims to Balzacian realism and accumulation of detail – bypasses her head and results in pretentious inaccuracy about a pseudo-cosmopolitan aristocracy. Her work is sustained only by a superficial ‘cleverness’ that is able to present shoddy used goods as bright and new. She manufactures commodities with the labour of her body like the working class without thought, whether that be for serious questions of ethics or aesthetics, of politics, of the relationship of art and commerce, of the nature of culture either popular or élite. The narrator nails her coffin firmly shut by explaining that, despite all the above, he liked her because ‘she rested me so from literature’ (p. 219; cf. Ambrosini below, footnote 9, p. 167, on James and Ouida). One re-imagines Ouida/Stormer as the successful landlady of a pub, resplendent in costume jewellery she has bought after a healthy night’s takings, garrulous with a visit once of the local gentry and impressing her regulars with a smattering of school-girl French. Such a person’s portrait is not fit to hang in either respectable or avant-garde galleries – though it might appear, with other celebrity images, on a cigarette card.16 Arnold Bennett, Beerbohm, London and Wilde would happily slum, we know, but what pleasure can Tennyson, Ruskin, William Morris and Vernon Lee have derived from engaging with such a pub landlady? If we are to understand this latter, we must acknowledge that there are other ways of understanding and portraying Ouida. The essays in this collection aim to help us reflect on what issues are at stake when conceptualizing a vivid representative of that problematic category, ‘Victorian popular culture’. We have no desire to defend Ouida’s misogyny, her anti-Semitism or what Ambrosini calls her ‘colonialist gestures’: ours is not a hagiography but an attempt to re-evaluate what Elwin dismissed as ‘worthlessness and artificiality’ typical of ‘the taste and mentality of the new reading public, 15 Henry James, ‘Greville Fane’, 1892 in Henry James, Complete Stories 1892–1898 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 215–33, p. 221. 16 The simile here derives from how one of the few photographs Ouida allowed to be taken of her (by the photographers Elliott and Fry probably in early 1887) featured as one of Ogden’s Guinea Cigarette Cards (issued in 1901 – see Figure I.1) and from how Max Beerbohm had written that G.S. Street’s earlier defence of Ouida was like ‘a young man defending the moral character of a barmaid who has bewitched him’ (‘Ouida’, More (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1899), 101–17, p. 106.

Introduction

5

created by industrial development and cheap education’.17 To achieve our aim we have divided the volume into three parts. The first part, ‘Rereading Ouida,’ is concerned to help us in general terms rethink Ouida in the early twenty-first century. Andrew King begins this process with a chapter intended to set the following ones in the context of Ouida’s life. The four book-length biographies of Ouida treat their subject with varying sympathy and attention to nuance and ambiguity. As Jane Jordan has shown elsewhere, they are all problematic in one way or another, either censoring letters to avoid offense to those still living (as in the first biography), or carelessly translating and altering evidence for comic effect (as in the last).18 Taking his cue from an analytical procedure suggested by Colin Sparks in the 1990s whereby the ‘popular’ is analyzed into its quantitative, aesthetic and political components, King offers a brief new biography, focussing on Ouida’s publication history – her income, her circulation figures and how she was circulated – and linking that to her aesthetic and political trajectory from her earliest commercial works to her last, politicallyengaged interventions. Pamela Gilbert’s elegantly conversational chapter asks us to reflect on our own reading practices and values in a style that itself seeks to engage the reader. Gilbert places Ouida very firmly in the sentimental tradition of fictional writing, stressing ‘the politics of affect’ that puts the onus on the reader to interpret and do justice to the characters. Taking a longer view of how academia has dealt with the work of the recovery of women writers, Gilbert argues that it is necessary now to ‘find a mode of reading that fully respect[s] the complexities of our subject.’ Ouida in particular, she writes, …has much to teach us of the vexed class and gender politics of her period, as her reception teaches us about our own contradictory investment in a literary form considered inherently bourgeois and conservative and reveals the ways we simultaneously demand innovation within and resistance to bourgeois ideals. (p. 38)

But, as Gilbert points out, we can only understand the lessons that Ouida can teach if we pause to consider what is at stake for us: how far are we committed to seeing non-realist genres such as Ouida writes as failed realism? How far do we still believe in what Gilbert calls ‘the romance of resistance’? Certainly the cultural penetration of Ouida’s work suggests that it succeeded very well Elwin, Victorian Wallflowers, p. 311. See Jane Jordan, ‘Everything is TRUE as solemnly as I can declare it’: The Case

17 18

of Ouida and her Biographers’, in Life Writing: The Spirit of the Age and the State of the Art, eds Meg Jensen and Jane Jordan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), 183–94. The four main biographies comprise Elizabeth Lee, Ouida: A Memoir (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1914) ; Yvonne ffrench, Ouida; a Study in Ostentation (London: Cobden: Sanderson, 1938); Eileen Bigland, Ouida, The Passionate Victorian (London: Jarrold’s, 1950); Monica Stirling, The Fine and the Wicked: The Life and Times of Ouida (London: Gollancz, 1957).

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in encoding ‘fantasies, desires, resentments and the realities of power relations in ways that were perfectly legible to her audience’, but perhaps the academic triumph of the Great Tradition has blinded us to alternatives. Picking up from her earlier work on Ouida (Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels, 1997), Gilbert takes Ouida as a case study of how we in the twenty-first century can read nineteenth-century women’s and popular writing. Interrogating canon‑formation through filiation with ancestor and successor texts, Gilbert focusses on the sentimental, lyrical and satirical aspects of Ouida, and in particular on how these play out in her 1881 novel A Village Commune. Gilbert shows how Ouida stands in uncomfortable relation with both the traditional highstatus canon and its more recent reformulations based on feminist concerns, and uses that discomfort to think through our notions of the ‘popular’. Jane Jordan traces Ouida’s literary affiliations in a different way, excavating the literary antecedents of three of Ouida’s earliest novels, the sensational romances Strathmore (1865), Chandos (1866) and Under Two Flags (1867), all of which were serialized in the early 1860s and subsequently published by Chapman & Hall. Their dating is important since they span the period in which Ouida emerged, within the space of a few years, from relative obscurity as an assumed male periodical writer into the outré celebrity status she cultivated at the Langham Hotel from 1867. In establishing the literary sources freely plundered by Ouida, Jordan lays to rest the myth that Ouida learnt about the army from louche conversations with soldiers at the Langham Hotel. Furthermore, she argues that Ouida did so much more than merely imitate the work of father-figure novelists like Bulwer Lytton and George A. Lawrence; rather, detailed analysis of Ouida’s three novels allows us to recognize the extent to which the author posing, successfully, as a male author set out to re-write the male romance. As most of the essays in this volume attest, Ouida’s position in relation to Victorian feminism is always highly problematic, yet Jordan detects a serious engagement with gender politics in Ouida’s early body of work, one that scrutinizes the function of women within the homosocial framework. Drawing on the recent work of Carolyn Oulton, Jordan demonstrates how Ouida consistently pushes at the culturally legitimate boundaries of ‘romantic friendship’ between men, before outing the already flagrant homoerotic elements she included in her early novels and their relation to the ‘buried’ life of the male homosexual. In so doing, she demonstrates the important point of how what was once considered marginal to or even outside Victorian popular culture, could be accommodated within it. Part I of the volume seeks to help us today read and understand Ouida anew both as figure and as metonym for her works; Part II examines some of the ways she and her work were appropriated and responded to by her contemporaries at various points on the commercial/anti-commercial cultural spectrum. Hayley Bradley maps the (unauthorized) stage adaptations of Moths in the early 1880s. Moths famously proved so popular that Mudie’s lending library could not meet the demand for copies and so arrived on the stage with all the commercial advantages of the presold. Ouida made very public that she was not happy at the way the products

Introduction

7

of her labour were mined for material without her permission, and the result was an illuminating exchange of letters in the press in which the first adaptor of Moths, Henry Hamilton, as well as the theatre world in general (including the actress who would play the heroine) sought to defend such adaptation. The result was happy publicity for all. Bradley sums it up with a quotation from The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post when Moths was performed in Bristol: ‘the belief in literary circles is that, whilst the advent of the drama was most fortunately heralded by “Ouida’s” attack, the literary fortunes of the novelist have been at the same time materially helped by Mr Hamilton’s defence and defiance.’19 Metacommentary like this was part of the wider popular culture publicity machine, a circular gyre which never really questioned the value of profit and whose conflicts were only superficial, as Ouida well knew. Bradley goes on to explain the processes play versions had to go through to fulfil their commercial promise. She pays especial attention to the ways various adaptations came to conclude the plot of Ouida’s novel, sometimes with startling changes, which, as she says, could add the piquancy of the unexpected while maintaining both stage conventions and semiotic openness. If Jordan was keen to show how Ouida engaged with older sibling texts and Bradley with clones genetically modified to suit alien environments, Kandola and Moody look at how younger writers engaged with Ouida. Kandola traces a fraught relation between the popular Ouida and her fellow Anglo-Italian, the upper-class Vernon Lee, by comparing and contrasting Ouida’s novel Ariadnê with what is now a much better known work critical of the Aesthetic movement, Miss Brown (indeed, another edition has recently been published20). Kandola suggests a close but unacknowledged relationship between the two novels that ‘ultimately leads to “an innovative articulation of a female subject position with regards to high art and also breaks new ground by twinning this to a working-class subjectivity.”’ (p. 95) In so doing she revisits themes of femininity and class that Bradley’s work also suggestively covers, while enabling us to see how the popular and the exclusive interacted with one another. Gender and the idea of the validation of the popular are likewise key for Moody. As she shows, both Corelli and Ouida sought to validate themselves by claiming Genius, and Corelli generously claimed it on behalf of a sister popular writer (while putting herself in the position of someone who could determine what ‘genius’ was). Moody teases at the many problems such a claim posed for the Victorian popular woman writer, including how their bodies were to be circulated in the form of photographs, and, like Gilbert, she asks how we can read their ‘genius’ in the twenty-first century. Moody answers by helpfully reminding us of how valuable sociological and cultural considerations of twentieth-century popular reading can

19 ‘“Moths” at the New Theatre Royal’, The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 26 October 1883, p. 3. 20 Vernon Lee, Miss Brown, ed. Karen Yuen, vol. 2 of New Woman Fiction, 1881– 1899 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010).

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be when considering that of the preceding century, explaining how popular ‘genius’ consists in the necessarily ambiguous articulation of cultural and social tensions. Gender, representational, status and class politics underlie all the chapters in this volume, but Part III is concerned to place Ouida in more specific political contexts. In her chapter, Diana Maltz returns to a set of novels that Talia Schaffer had famously discussed over a decade ago, but from a completely new angle. Whereas Schaffer had regarded the set as prefiguring 1890s aestheticism, Maltz relates them to perceptions of Russian aristocratic cosmopolitanism. The Russian bear was very much in the news in the 1880s (Punch has a famous double page image of Europe anxiously watching the ‘Great Bear’ in the sky, sword at the ready21). But rather than focus on the relation of the novels to the stereotypes manufactured and sustained by newspapers and topical periodicals, Maltz analyzes Ouida’s fascination with the modernity of aristocratic Russians, ‘born of a hybridity that [Ouida] registers as cultural, genetic, and ethical’ (p. 132) and which in some of its aspects could lead towards a radical new vision and New Life. Indeed, one of Maltz’s most unexpected and elucidating discoveries is Ouida’s engagement with the radical progressive Henry Salt and Tolstoyans. Even if Ouida kept them at a distance, she still had much in common with them, as Maltz shows. Pykett offers a more general overview of Ouida’s non-fictional journalism between April 1878 and June 1906, detailing her opinions on modernity, decadence and degeneration, science, war and conscription, animal rights, female suffrage, anarchism and socialism. She pays particular attention to Ouida’s rhetorical strategies in responding to issues of the day, explaining that while she did so in an assertive manner, she remained dialogic, setting up debate with writers and speechmakers whose words she comments on. This is legible even in Ouida’s less considered ‘Society’ journalism such as ‘Lemaître on Dress’ for the upmarket monthly Lady’s Realm in 1897, a piece which Pykett does not comment on but which confirms her general points. Typically, in Ouida’s argument with the drama critic and playwright Jules Lemaître over what women should wear, she prioritizes experience over diktat, and wryly regards the ignorance of men speaking about women’s clothes – while not hesitating herself to advise men on what looks good on them.22 What Pykett brings out in particular is how Ouida’s anxieties over modernity anticipate many of our own. Her concerns about profit-driven industrialization damaging the environment still stand; her worries about how communications technologies impair our daily lives prefigure ours about email; her disquiet about the rhetorical use of science and external threat to generate fear looks forward to Frank Furedi’s analysis of the ‘Culture of Fear’ in order to control populations.23

John Tenniel, ‘What of the Night?’ Punch, 90 (23 October 1886), 198–9. Ouida, ‘Lemaître on Dress’, Lady’s Realm, 3 (November 1897), 65–9. 23 Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation 21 22

(London: Continuum, 2002).

Introduction

9

Dialogism with its possibilities for change is legible also in Ambrosini’s chapter. Taking his cue from post-colonial studies, Ambrosini reads Ouida’s work in English on Italy and in Italian on Britain and demonstrates how, from an Italian perspective today, her anti-modernist and anti-imperialist aestheticism can be regarded as a typical colonising gesture which, through translations, Italians only too happily introjected. Regarding them as fictions that echo Ouida’s own selfinvention in Italy, Ambrosini nuances the too easy celebration of her assertiveness as a woman artist by highlighting who had to be diminished for her to rise. Like Gilbert, he devotes a good number of words to Ouida’s A Village Commune, and concludes that the novel should be read as a hybrid text that, while purporting to be a sociological and political essay rendered in fictional terms, is typical rather of British tourist views of Italy. Such views offered to British readers, Ambrosini explains, an idyllic alternative through which an aesthetically and politically ugly Britain could be criticized. In Ouida’s late journalism, by contrast, Ambrosini finds another Ouida more alive to the Italian reality around her. His careful attention to her journalism in Italian is especially revealing, reminding us that should take into account the transnational publication practices of many Victorian writers. In terms of her output and her cultural penetration, Ouida was, as Schroeder and Holt entitle the first critical volume devoted entirely to a reading of Ouida’s novels, ‘a phenomenon.’24 The dominant themes they brought out from a reading of most of Ouida’s novels in volume form comprised criticism of the society of the spectacle avant la lettre and a preoccupation with gender politics. The present volume, unlike their examination of the author through a theoretical lens, seeks throughout to contextualize Ouida by placing her in a variety of environments and only then asking us what we are doing when we read and react to her. In other words, the essays in this collection are keen to present Ouida not as an isolated ‘phenomenon’ but as a crucial node, typical and peculiar at the same time, in the vast mobile and mutable textual and personal network which was Victorian Popular Culture.

24 Natalie Schroeder and Shari Hodges Holt, Ouida the Phenomenon: Evolving Social, Political and Gender Concerns in Her Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008).

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Part I Rereading Ouida

Fig. 1.1

Frontispiece from Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos selected from the Works of Ouida by F. Sidney Morris (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1884): engraving by Illman brothers from an original photograph by Adolphe Beau, Regent Street, London, dating from Ouida’s sojourn at the Langham Hotel (1867–71), with Ouida’s signature

Chapter 1

Ouida 1839–1908: Quantities, Aesthetics, Politics Andrew King

The Introduction began by remarking how Ouida would have hated the title of this collection. ‘Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture’ is deliberately contentious not only for that reason. It has been a commonplace for half a century now that the ‘popular’ is always open to tactical and strategic redefinition. Indeed, the battles to claim it may seem old-fashioned in our post-postmodern age of austerity and functionality. Nonetheless, definitions from 20 years ago can still be useful to rethink Ouida and what she stands for.1 Synthesising the British left tradition of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall with the then newer work of the Australian Colin Fiske, Colin Sparks suggested that for the purpose of analysis the ‘popular’ be split into the quantitative, aesthetic and political, concluding pessimistically in terms of the latter that the popular is ‘necessarily a reactionary category’.2 It is his triple breakdown of the popular that has chiefly prompted the thinking behind this chapter. I offer a literary and biographical survey intended to help the reader contextualise the individual essays in this collection both in terms of Ouida’s life and works but also in terms of what the wider issues are in the study of literary historical figures such as she. That Ouida was ‘popular’ in the first, quantitative, sense offered by Sparks is hard to contest: the ‘Introduction’ above showed how she shifted a lot of copy during and after her lifetime. But numbers sold comprise only one side the ‘quantitative’ aspect of popular culture: how much did Ouida earn from her work? That the quantitative interacts with the aesthetic and political aspects of the popular will hardly surprise either: the question here is how exactly the three categories will engage in a conversation that makes up Ouida’s life and popular art. It is agreed by all biographers that Marie Louise Ramé was born on 1 January 1839 to Susan Sutton and Louis Ramé and that she was brought up in her maternal grandmother’s house, 1 Union Terrace, in the small provincial English market For a recent attempt to claim the term for pre-industrial cultural analysis that comes to conclusions very different from mine (because for different purposes) through indebted to many of the same theorists, see Holt N. Parker, ‘Toward a Definition of Popular Culture,’ History and Theory, 50 (May 2011), 147–70. 2 Colin Sparks, ‘Popular Journalism: Theories and Practice’, in Journalism and Popular Culture, eds Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (London: Sage, 1992), pp. 24–44. 1

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town of Bury St Edmund’s. Nominally a French teacher, her father was rarely en famille and does not seem to have provided them with any sustained income. The women had to fend for themselves. In 1857, they moved to London, perhaps because of gossip occasioned by Ramé’s secretive comings and goings.3 M. Ramé visited the women’s ménage in late 1857 and came again in 1863. It is not certain when Ouida last saw her father. In terms of her literary career, much more important is that her grandmother became ill and the surgeon engaged to treat her was the colourful William Francis Ainsworth. He supplemented his surgeon’s fees with writing, a typical double income stream of the time, and helped his cousin, the now more famous Harrison Ainsworth, conduct several magazines, including Bentley’s Miscellany.4 Ouida offered Bentley’s a two-part tale,5 the cousins recognized its market potential, and from April 1859 to July 1862 only one number of Bentley’s passed without including something by her. Within two years Ouida was writing a serial novel for another periodical Harrison Ainsworth owned and ran, the New Monthly Magazine. This was Granville de Vigne, later published in triple-decker format as Held in Bondage with Tinsley. Ouida sold the short-term volume-form printing rights for £50. Tinsley, rather unpleasantly, wrote that they could have got the complete copyright had they driven a hard bargain.6 Strathmore followed the same publication pattern, though published, after negotiations, by Chapman & Hall who were now to become Ouida’s regular British publishers. She managed to sell them the short-term copyright for £75. Unsurprisingly, the family of three women could not live in London on such an income, and Ouida came to an arrangement with two other publishers for overseas rights: with Lippincott, the Philadelphia publisher, who gave her $200 for the rights to Strathmore, and, in 1865, with the German publisher Baron von Tauchnitz who published continental re-editions of her works.7 Celia Phillips, like Jordan 3 See Elizabeth Lee, Ouida: A Memoir (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1914) ; Yvonne ffrench, Ouida; a Study in Ostentation (London: Cobden: Sanderson, 1938); Eileen Bigland, Ouida, The Passionate Victorian (London: Jarrold’s, 1950); Monica Stirling, The Fine and the Wicked: The Life and Times of Ouida (London: Gollancz, 1957). On the hypothetical reason for the move to London, see Lee, Ouida, p. 29. 4 See Stephen James Carver, The Life and Works of the Lancashire Novelist William Harrison Ainsworth 1805–1882 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), p. 382; Ellis, Ainsworth, II, p. 234. 5 ‘Dashwood’s Drag; or, The Derby and What Came of It’, Bentley’s Miscellany (April–May 1859), 335–43, 487–96. 6 William Tinsley, Random Recollections of an Old Publisher, 2 vols (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1900), I, p. 82. 7 Although they had been publishing Ouida since Held in Bondage in 1864, it was only the preface to Lippincott’s printing of Cecil Castlemain’s Gage in 1867 that announced that Lippincott’s were the only authorised American editions. James Cephas Derby, Fifty Years among Authors, Books and Publishers (G.W. Carleton & Co., 1884), pp. 386–7 records the story of how Lippincott reissued Held in Bondage for the American market as Granville de Vigne: he found the original title gave the impression the work was an anti-slavery tract.

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after her, concluded that ‘[a]s a middle-class woman with no financial resources, [Ouida] was painfully vulnerable in the business world of that “gentleman’s” trade, publishing, and neither Frederic Chapman nor, later, Andrew Chatto resisted the temptation to exploit her.’8 This is indubitably the case. But with both her American and German publishers Ouida was to entertain excellent relations for many decades. Tauchnitz records were destroyed in a bombing raid on Leipzig in 19439 so the sums paid to Ouida by that firm cannot now be recovered with any certainty; we do know, however, that Lippincott would give Ouida around £300 a year for advance proofs even though, before the UK–US copyright agreement of 1891, American publishers were not obliged to pay anything for works published outside US territory. Given her heavy presence in the press – Idalia (which immediately followed on from serialization of Strathmore) and Under Two Flags being serialized at the same time – Ouida might have been advised not to overload the market with further serialization. In 1866, Chandos went straight into three-volume form with Chapman & Hall for the same price of £75 for the first 500 copies and a further £75 if a further 200 were printed.10 That year Ouida’s mother sold some property: clearly her daughter’s writing alone, even when dealing with several publishers simultaneously, did not provide a sufficient income.11 Perhaps Ouida’s mother needed to pay her own mother’s medical bills, for in September 1866 old Mrs Sutton died. The remaining two women quickly moved nearer the centre of town, occupying first some apartments in Welbeck Street in Marylebone (a parallel to the Wimpole Street of Elizabeth Barrett renown), and, shortly afterwards, a suite in the new Langham Hotel in nearby Portland Square. Such a move, glamorously bohemian though it seems, suggests that Ouida and her mother were acknowledging their temporary and uncertain status in the centre. Ouida and her mother capitalized on their new location by holding parties where, according to one of the anecdotes that never fail to get mentioned, they were the only women present amongst a bevy of young Guards officers. Deriving Like so many, Lippincott thought Ouida was a male pseudonym (on speculation about the gender of ‘Ouida,’ see Jordan below, pp. 57–61). On Ouida in Tauchnitz, see William B. Todd and Ann Bowden, Tauchnitz International Editions 1841–1955: A Bibliographical History (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1988), p. 1004: they list 44 Ouida titles from Idalia in 1867 to the posthumous Helianthus in 1909. 8 Celia Phillips, ‘Ouida and her Publishers: 1874–1880’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 81.2 (1978), 210–15, p. 215; Jane Jordan, The Writings of ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée), unpublished PhD dissertation, Birkbeck College, University of London (1995), pp. 13–15, p. 17, p. 20. 9 Todd and Bowden, Tauchnitz, pp. 121, 845. The three short letters from Ouida to Tauchnitz, like those from other writers printed in Der Verlag Bernhard Tauchnitz 1837– 1912 (Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1912), were clearly chosen to demonstrate a good relationship between them. Lee (Ouida) prints more letters but nothing that gives any figures. 10 Details of the publication terms derive from Jordan, Writings, p. 9. 11 Lee, Ouida, p. 18.

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from Tinsley’s patronizing portrait of the ‘little lady’ in Random Recollections, the very repetition of this tale has lent it a peculiar weight and colour that it is very unlikely to have had in reality.12 That the two women did receive at the Langham is certain, but not in the ridiculous way described. What is very probable is that Ouida, the provincial woman writer unconnected by birth or position, was trying to insert herself into the networks of the men who controlled culture and letters. Amongst the many guests were the explorer, diplomat and orientalist Richard Burton and his wife Isabel. Ouida maintained correspondence with them until Richard’s death in 1890. There is an oft-repeated story that Ouida used the conversations she heard between men at her Langham gatherings for her now most famous novel, Under Two Flags. But, as Jordan demonstrates in her chapter below, Ouida’s knowledge of military life was derived from reading rather than from conversations with military men.13 Such textual knowledge is legible in the short stories she had published in Bentley’s in the early 60s, several of which devastatingly critique male pomposity exemplified by the soldier.14 Then again, Ouida moved into the hotel after she had published Under Two Flags. Receiving £6 per monthly instalment, she published the novel over 1865–66 in the British Army and Navy Review, a monthly to which Ouida had contributed a series of stories and non-fiction articles on military matters since July 1864.15 Just as Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret was left incomplete in its first manifestation as a serial in the twopenny weekly Robin Goodfellow, Under Two Flags was unfinished when the British Army and Navy Review folded in June 1866. Bentley had taken over the Review in December 1865 but failed to save it. He later refused to publish the novel in volume format on the advice of his reader Geraldine Jewsbury who concluded that ‘the story would sell but … you would lower the character of your house if you accept it’.16 Ouida wrote to another potential publisher, Frederick Chapman, a few months later claiming that the premature termination of the serial had left ‘military men’ waiting ‘with intense impatience’ to read the end. Her sales pitch to Chapman worked, for he published it as a triple-decker in November the following year. Lippincott gave her £300 ‘by trade courtesy’ for his one-volume edition, and Tauchnitz brought it out in 1871. Three years later, Ouida was to sell her copyright outright to Chapman for less than £150. This was to prove a costly mistake even if, contrary to what has been claimed, the novel was initially only moderately successful. Its real success came in the 1890s when it sold in enormous numbers in cheap editions: Chatto & Windus, who bought the copyright 12 Tinsley, Random Recollections, pp. 82–5, esp. p. 85. See Jordan below, p. 55 on this anecdote. 13 See Jordan, pp. 65–70 below. 14 See e.g. ‘Little Grand and the Marchioness,’ New Monthly Magazine, 119 (May–July 1860) 10–19, pp. 141–51, pp. 319–29. 15 Publication details of Under Two Flags in this paragraph are based on Celia Phillips, ‘Under Two Flags: The Publishing History of a Best-Seller 1867–1967’, Publishing History, 3 (1978), 67–9. Phillips was unaware of Bentley’s relations with the Army and Navy Review, and the account here differs accordingly. 16 See Jordan below, pp. 58–9.

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from Chapman in 1876 as part of their vigorous expansion policy, were to print around 700,000 copies. Ouida got nothing from this very considerable quantitative enlargement of her reading public. No wonder she was to write to her agent in November 1884 that ‘Chatto & Chapman are two rogues who play into each other’s hands to keep down prices like the publisher in “Pendennis.”’17 Idalia was serialized in the New Monthly concurrently with Under Two Flags in the British Army and Navy, but from now on Ouida avoided serials where possible – she later claimed it damaging to fiction18 – and three more volume-form novels followed: Tricotrin (1869), Puck (1870) and Folle-Farine (1871). All of Ouida’s works from the 1860s utilized tropes and topics already well established in the market place, combining conventional yet topical sensation themes of crime and bigamy with dashing heroes modelled, it is generally agreed, on the muscular work of George Lawrence’s Guy Livingstone (1857).19 Idalia, a spirited narrative whose hero is decidedly in the muscular mould (and both admiringly and ironically treated), is interesting for the first use by Ouida of a European revolutionary setting, due no doubt to its topicality. The recently won independence of Italy was prominent in the news and the novel’s highly successful dramatization at the St. James’s Theatre exploited the various locales with lavish scenic effects.20 Puck (1870), a novel of the demi-monde narrated by a dog decades before Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933), was likewise topical in its blatant references to contemporary prostitutes who appeared in the press.21 Even the use of an animal narrator had a commercially successful predecessor in A.L.O.E.’s witty children’s book Rambles of Rat (1857), as well as in the fables and fairy stories of La Fontaine that from her diary we know Ouida read. The many ‘It-narratives’ of the periodical press (stories of objects being passed from owner to owner) would also have directed her to such a narrator. 22 Ouida’s aesthetic decisions from this period seem to follow the well-known pattern of a literate, middle-class woman Letter to Anderson Rose, quoted by Jordan, Writings, p. 44. Pykett discusses Ouida’s 1885 essay ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’ (see p. 29

17 18

below) and see pp. 28–9 below for a brief discussion of Ouida’s later letter to The Times ‘New Literary Factors’. 19 On Ouida and Lawrence, see Athenaeum, 1 February 1908, p. 128; Lee, Ouida, p. 246 and esp. Jordan, below, pp. 55–6. Jordan (‘Ouida: How Conceptions of the Popular Reader Contributed to the Making of a Popular Novelist’, in A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900, eds Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland, [Farnham: Ashgate, 2011], pp. 37–54) considered the relation of Ouida’s early work to sensation fiction; see also Jordan’s ‘Ouida’, in A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 220–31. 20 See The Times, 23 April 1867, p. 12. 21 Cyril Pearl, The Girl with the Swansdown Seat (London: Muller, 1955), esp. ch. 3 and pp. 58–68 remain useful for the visibility of prostitutes in the press at this time. 22 On Rambles of a Rat, see J.S. Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 76–7. On ‘It-narratives’, see The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007).

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labouring to keep her family out of the workhouse. She was fundamentally, to use Nigel Cross’s term, a ‘female drudge’23 whose use of established tropes, topical themes and newspaper stories resulted from a calculated need to manage the risks involved in the launch of any new product in the marketplace. If in her aesthetic decisions she was savvy, in other ways Ouida was not a good businesswoman. Despite her enormous sales, vigorous negotiations with her publishers and her employment of agents and a variety of go-betweens, she usually earned less than £1,300 per novel. This was not a great deal of money: even weekly serialists in the penny papers could achieve that and more. Mary Braddon could earn £2,000 per novel. In the high-status field, George Eliot was promised £10,000 for the serialization of Romola in the Cornhill.24 Desperate for ready cash, Ouida almost always sold her copyrights when, with more financial planning, she could have exploited the royalty system which was already becoming more and more common in the 1860s: instead, she made an unusually early attack on the notion of International Copyright based partly on her good treatment by Lippincott and partly on an effort to distance herself from manual labour.25 Her decision meant that to generate income she had to keep producing more words to sell year after year, a very powerful reason behind her vast output between 1859 and 1900. This financially quantitative aspect of her work is discernible in her aesthetic and political positions of the 1860s. Ouida never forgets that art is a commercial product. The cynical Puck, unlike his predecessor A.L.O.E.’s rat, has ‘as great a horror of seeming stupid as of seeming edifying’ (Puck, 1870, 1, p. 8). His cicerone to the ways of world, the witty, fashionable and blasé toy-terrier bitch, Fanfreluche, ironically sums up the moral of his memoirs with the materialist notion ‘[t]hat there is nothing on earth satisfactory except – a good Dinner.’ Puck agrees: what contributes most to human happiness is ‘the Art of Dining’ (Puck, 1870, 3, p. 425). Even where art works figure largely and artists are important characters, the art is not discussed. The novel Folle Farine has as its protagonist a woman who renounces her artist beloved to become a prostitute so that he will be made 23 Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch. 5 passim. 24 Lady Paget regarded Ouida as ‘a bad woman of business’ (quoted in Henry G. Huntingdon, Memories, Personages, People, Places (London: Constable & Co, 1911), p. 195); Celia Phillips and Jane Jordan both confirm this. On the income of novelists in penny weeklies, see Andrew King, The London Journal: Periodicals, Production and Gender (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 96–7; R.C. Terry’s Victorian Popular Fiction 186080 (London: Macmillan, 1983) is still useful, as are Nigel Cross’s Common Writer and Peter Keating’s The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Secker and Warburg 1989), ch. 1. On Braddon, see Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York: Garland, 1979), pp. 134–7; on George Eliot’s business dealings, see Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York: Knopf, 1975). 25 See two letters to the Editor of Reader, 3 November 1866, p. 910 and 1 December 1866, p. 973. See also Ouida’s letters to The Times, 8 August 1883, p. 4; 26 July 1886, p. 3; 3 April 1891, p. 13.

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famous by a rich art collector. Yet the novel is less an enquiry into the effect of art on society than a denunciation of men who are blind to the value of women who love them.26 In the earlier Chandos, the eponymous hero, already vastly wealthy, writes an erotic novel on the subject of Lucrèce, its very title combining erotic French with classicism, the name containing at once sex, honour and fidelity unto death – themes common to Ouida, and perhaps a reference to Bulwer-Lytton’s 1846 novel Lucretia.27 Lucrèce is lauded by Society yet tossed over as soon as its author had lost his money. After a period in the hell of the Parisian drug-taking underworld, the hero eventually understands that his real wealth lies in his mental training and genius because these depend upon him alone. In the second half of the novel, he earns a respectable if humble living by writing idealistic philosophical tracts rather than politically activist ones (though the exact nature of what he writes is not clear). What is emphasised, rather, is his success amongst the ‘people’ as opposed to ‘Society’, and the social effect this popularity has. Nonetheless, while promoting ‘freedom’ and Italian nationalism (the hero spends several periods in Italy), the novel in the end supports the old aristocratic order by signifying as a reward Chandos’s restoration to his ancestral home through the generosity of an old aristocratic friend. The ‘people’ actually have no real part to play: they are a supporting backdrop rather like the chorus in, say, a Donizetti opera – or in the English composer Cowen’s 1892 operatic version of Ouida’s novel Signa.28 In all these narratives, personal relations are the only sphere of possible resistance to exploitative commercial, quantitative transaction, in rather different ways from Ouida’s 1877 Kunsterlinroman Ariadnê that Kandola discusses below. The Franco-Prussian War and ensuing Paris Commune were headline news between July 1870 and May 1871. One unconfirmed idea is that Louis Ramé was killed in the Commune.29 If that were the case and they knew of it, then it is strange that Ouida and her mother did not go to Paris when, in August 1871, they left London for a tour of the continent. They went first to Belgium where they stayed in Brussels, visiting the Ardennes and Antwerp. They arrived in Florence, via Germany, in November. As a transition between England and Italy, 1871 was crucial for Ouida. She was to live in Tuscany for the remaining 37 years of her life, with a few visits to Venice and Rome, to Austria and just one to London. Her engagement with Italian literary society was rapid. Pascarèl, her first novel written in Tuscany and a love song to northern Italy and to Florence in particular, was written with one eye on the London and international market and one on the local. Besides its publication in triple26 For an excellent and admiring analysis of Folle-Farine, see Pamela Gilbert, ‘Ouida and the Other New Woman’, in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Diane Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 170–88. 27 See Jordan Chapter 3 below, pp. 64–5. 28 On this version of Signa, see Christopher J. Parker, ‘The Music of Sir Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852–1935): A Critical Study’, PhD thesis, University of Durham, 2007: ch. 4. On the use of the chorus, see esp. p. 166. 29 Ouida claimed, when challenged to prove her French nationality, that her father and all his papers disappeared after the Commune (Lee, Ouida, p. 140).

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decker format by Chapman & Hall in February 1873, in one volume by Lippincott in America and in two by Tauchnitz in Leipzig, Pascarèl was serialized in the Nuova Antologia. This intellectual Florentine monthly had been started in 1866 to mark the spiritual and cultural life of the emergent nation when Florence was capital of an (almost) united Italy, and I have argued elsewhere that Pascarèl’s new publication venue lent it a more explicit political stance than hitherto evident in Ouida’s work.30 When Ouida arrived in Florence, the capital had only just moved to Rome, leaving property vacant and cheap. While her enthusiasm for the cause of Italian independence and her deep appreciation of the beauty of Tuscany cannot be doubted, two more incentives to stay must have been that it was far cheaper than London, and that while quickly keyed into the local publishing industry she could easily remain in touch with her British, German and American (and, to a lesser extent, the French) interests. Ouida’s work continued to sell reasonably well, but the speed with which her work fell into cheap editions was increasing. She was not alone in this, for the whole configuration of the market was changing. Under Chapman & Hall in the 1860s, it had been usual to leave about a year before triple-deckers were re-offered as 5s. reprints. This accorded with the gentleman’s agreement between the publishers and the major lending libraries, Mudie’s and Smith’s, who needed to keep the price of novels high to ensure their customers could only afford to read respectable fiction by borrowing from them. By Signa (1875), however, the reprint came out after only four months. This modified business model contributed nothing to Ouida’s income. Ariadnê (1878) earned her a mere £800 from Chapman & Hall – who promptly sold the rights to Chatto & Windus for £1000 under a curious agreement whereby both houses published it simultaneously. Chapman & Hall also sold their other Ouida copyrights to Chatto without consulting her. Though furious, she felt that she had no choice but to accede to being passed between men. Chatto & Windus now aimed her work at multiple markets carefully distributed over time: the first printing was directed at a premium market with the 31s 6d. triple decker; the 5s. market was hit about four months later, and as long as demand held, the novel was eventually passed down to the 2s. and even, in two cases, the 6d. one. 31 See Andrew King, ‘The Origins of Ouida’s Pascarèl (1873): The Combination Novel, Myths of the Female Artist and the Commerce of Art’, Anglistica Pisana, 6.1/2 (2009), 77–86. After Pascarèl, translations of Ouida’s novels by ‘Diana d’Arco’ (Enrico Montazio) appeared regularly from the Tipografia della Gazetta d’Italia in Florence throughout the 1870s: see Valeria Pellis, ‘The Fortune of the Italian Translations of Ouida’s Novels,’ Anglistica Pisana, 6.1/2 (2009), 53–60; see Figure 9.1 below for an example of the covers of the Italian translations. 31 Simon Eliot, ‘The Three-Decker Novel and its First Cheap reprint 1862–1894,’ The Library, series 6, 7.1, 38–53. On Ouida see especially pp. 49–51. Basing her conclusions on the Chatto & Windus ledger books at Reading University, Jordan has shown that sales of Ouida’s Italian novels remained steady, but they never exceeded half the volume of the cheap editions of her 1860s novels (‘Ouida’, in The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics and Art, eds Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa and Paul Vita (Milan: Polimetrica, 2009), 61–79, p. 63, note 63). 30

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Such a strategy ensured the consumption of the same work across a wide social spectrum, generating the effect referred to at the opening of the Introduction of huge sales and broad cultural penetration. Through their covers, the yellowbacks also consciously directed the interpretation of her novels towards the coyly sentimental and the safe: one would hardly imagine from the yellowback cover of A Village Commune that it was a political attack (see Figure 2.1), or from that of Ariadnê that it was an aesthetic assertion by a woman artist (see Figure 5.1). Rather than Ouida’s knotted crest that appeared on expensive volumes,32 the mark of a Ouida novel in the two-shilling market was a beautiful young woman and a friendly dog. Chatto is visibly here trying to recuperate her for the popularas-reactionary. Ouida, desirous that the personal she wrote of in her fiction carry through in her relations with publishers (as it did with Tauchnitz), was incensed at the treatment of herself as nothing but a generator of commodities from which publishers could profit. Yet at the same time, she was moving along an aesthetic trajectory that in part sought to validate that very exploitation. She sought to counterbalance the diminished price paid for her work by reconceptualizing writing aesthetically and ethically, justifying her exploitation by shifting the grounds of its value. This meant a gradual and uneven passage from her earlier commercial conception and practice to a political and altruistic ideal, where the artwork’s impact upon society was more important than personal financial gain. While there are certainly adumbrations in her works from the 1860s (especially in Idalia and Chandos), Ouida’s changing conception of art was noted by critics for the first time in reviews of her Italian works from the early 1870s. The Athenaeum noted Pascarèl’s (1873) difference from her previous novels, praising it as ‘a work of rich nature, but highly wrought art, with art itself, and genius and Italy for its themes … far in advance of Ouida’s earlier novels’.33 Lady Paget understood it as the result of Ouida’s first encounter with Italy,34 though rather than in a literal sense (which Paget wanted), Ouida’s was a literary encounter with the Italy of the European imagination, and so inevitably with its artistic inheritance.35 Signa (1875), In a Winter City (1876), Ariadnê (1877) and Friendship (1878) all engage in explicit debate over forms of art – the theatre, music, painting, writing and sculpture – and with their production, consumption and value. All four novels discuss the relation of art to the market and, more generally, the place and function 32 On Ouida’s crest, see Andrew King, ‘Crafting the Woman Artist: Ouida and Ariadnê’, in Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski, eds., Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 207–66. 33 Athenaeum, 29 March 1873, p. 405. 34 See Paget, Scenes and Memories (London: Smith, Elder, 1912), p. 322; ffrench, Ouida, p. 81. Stirling, Fine and Wicked, pp. 47–8 takes the travels and feelings of the novel’s heroine as a direct representation of Ouida’s own. 35 See King, ‘The Origins of Ouida’s Pascarèl’.

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of art in society. In all but In a Winter City, artist-protagonists fail to communicate on a personal level and are victims of that inability. In Ariadnê – paradoxically the novel which was passed between men to their profit most outrageously when Chapman & Hall sold it to Chatto behind Ouida’s back – a woman artist is placed at the centre of the narrative for the first time, art is debated at greatest length and with greatest intensity, and the effects of the social organisation of art on the artist heroine most thoroughly tracked.36 In 1876 a long and generally appreciative article appeared on Ouida’s work in the prestigious Westminster Review.37 The same year Ouida helped Edmund Yates write a supposed interview with her at the Villa Farinola, her residence outside Florence, for the ‘Celebrities at Home’ series in The World, a series that was widely reproduced (she and Mary Braddon were the only female writers included). It was here that she announced the origin of her name in print.38 The following year, the Revue des Deux Mondes published a long appreciation.39 The immediately subsequent period was not so sunny. In late 1877, the year Chapman sold Ouida to Chatto, her banker went broke and eloped with a ballet girl. Lee (p. 94) claims Ouida’s financial state was soon righted without explaining why; she was probably discreetly alluding to Ouida’s outright sale of the copyrights to her early novels which had by now reverted to her.40 A need for income is also suggested by how, in 1878, Ouida returned to writing short tales, this time for Belgravia – now owned by Chatto & Windus – and for her American publisher’s house magazine Lippincott’s. She also wrote two pieces for the Whitehall Review on dogs (the first of which was reprinted in the RSPCA’s organ, Animal World) and had a short story, ‘Umiltà,’ published in French in the Revue des Deux Mondes.41 On a lighter note, in 1878 too, F.C. Burnand serialized Strapmore! A Romance by Weeder in Punch over several months, a parody which depends on good acquaintance with the Ouida of the 1860s and early 70s. Ouida’s subsequent novel, Friendship, proved almost as big a turning point in her life as her move to Tuscany. At some point after her arrival in Florence, Ouida had met the Marchese Lotario Lotteringo Lotteringhi della Stufa, and had fallen in love. Chamberlain to King Umberto, della Stufa came from an illustrious family that is traceable back to the ninth century and which includes saints On the relation of Ariadnê to Vernon Lee’s work, see Kandola below, pp. 93–107. ‘Ouida’s Novels’, Westminster Review, 49.2 (April 1876), 360–86. 38 See Jordan, Writings, pp. 39–40. The whole series was published in triple-decker 36 37

format in 1877 by the ‘Offices of The World’. 39 Th[erèse] Bentzon, ‘Les Romans Italiens d’un Auteur Anglais,’ Revue des Deux Mondes 22 (15 July 1877), 367–88. 40 Cf. Jordan, Writings, p. 12. 41 ‘Umiltà’ was later published in English in Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, 35 (January 1880), 38–58 and, later again in the year, in Pipistrello, a collection of short stories which came out simultaneously with Chatto & Windus, Tauchnitz, Munro in the US and (in French) Hachette in France.

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amongst its forebears.42 After the royal court moved to Rome from Florence in 1869, he spent only part of his time at his large country residence at Castagnolo. As a result, from the summer of 1870 he had kept only one wing of Castagnolo for his use and rented out the rest. His tenants were the dashing Janet Ross and her husband Henry, a failed banker 22 years Janet’s senior.43 Ouida had received a letter of introduction to Janet from her father Alexander Cornewall Duff Gordon, and it is possible that Ouida met della Stufa at Castagnolo. While very friendly towards Ouida, it seems that della Stufa was involved in an affair with Janet Ross. Crucially, Ouida was not aware of this. In 1874, she had moved to the countryside at Scandicci about five kilometres south-west of Florence, where she rented the four-storey Villa Farinola seven kilometres (as the crow flies) from Castagnolo.44 When she eventually discovered della Stufa’s affair, Ouida furiously exposed it in a roman-à-clef whose satirical portraits of members of the Florentine Anglo-Italian community were as transparent as they could be: Janet Ross, her husband and the Marchese della Stufa, Ouida herself and many others are all easily identifiable.45 Chatto wrote to Ouida in 1879 that ‘[t]he number of copies sold of ‘Friendship’ both in the 3 volume and the 5/- edition was much under what were sold of your previous books.’46 Yet in Florence records show that Friendship was the second most borrowed of all Ouida’s output in English in the premier lending library there, the Gabinetto Vieussieux. It was exceeded (by only two borrowings) by that other but much more indulgent roman à clef also set in a barely disguised Florence, In a Winter City.47 In French translation, Friendship’s popularity in the Gabinetto was equalled only by loans of Ouida’s next novel Moths.48 42 Stirling, Fine and Wicked, offers the most detailed account of this relationship, though hers is very unreliable, even down to her persistent misspelling of the Marchese’s name. It is safest to state that details of the relationship between Ouida and the Marchese we do not know, apart from that Ouida was very much in love with him and blamed her neighbour Janet Ross for stealing him from her. The Lotteringhi della Stufa family archives were destroyed in 1943, so discovery of Ouida’s letters to her beloved, even if they were conserved, is very unlikely. On the destruction of the archive, see http://siusa. archivi.beniculturali.it/ (accessed 25 January 2012). My sincere thanks go to the Pianetti Lotteringhi della Stufa family for confirming the above. 43 On Janet Ross, see Sarah Benjamin, A Castle in Tuscany: The Remarkable Life of Janet Ross (Miller’s Point, New South Wales: Pier 9, 2006). 44 The Villa Farinola is now a residential home, the Villa Consolata, on Via Bagnese in Alto Scandicci. 45 Janet Ross was immediately recognised by Enid Layard, the wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey, and by her friend Lady Charlotte Schreiber who in 1878 thought Friendship very amusing (see the Reading Experience Database, http://www.open.ac.uk/ Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id= 27547 [accessed 25 February 2012]). 46 Letter dated 12 May 1879, quoted in Alexis Weedon, ‘From Three-Deckers to Film Rights: A Turn in British Publishing Strategies, 1870–1930’, Book History, 2.1 (1999), 188–206, p. 197. 47 See Margherita Ciacci and Laura Desideri, ‘Ouida a Firenze: Letture e Lettori nella Communità Cosmopolita’, Anglistica Pisana, 6.1/2 (2009), 13–24, p. 20. 48 Pellis, 2006: 56.

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After Under Two Flags, Moths is now perhaps her best known. It was certainly popular in its day: Bradley discusses the craze for stage adaptations below. Supposedly the first novel in which a divorced woman ends happily, Moths (1880) can be grouped with Friendship as a social satire, but although its hero is a singer, its discussion of art is, by comparison with its five predecessors, minimal. Moths enjoyed a succès de scandale, helped by the critics’ universal vituperation of a ‘disgusting story.’49 Of a different order was the furore caused by A Village Commune (1881), which Gilbert and Ambrosini discuss in their respective chapters. A satire of a different kind from Moths or Friendship, it is a ferocious denunciation of Italian politics and capitalist modernity which impact disastrously on the lives of a local community. Ruskin liked it immensely.50 Not only did the novel provoke an angry response in the Contemporary Review, however,51 but – so Ouida wrote in a letter – she was shot at by a landowner who thought he recognised himself in one of the characters.52 Chatto in response asked that her next novel should replicate her short story ‘The Dog of Flanders’ or Ariadnê. Instead, she gave him In Maremma (1882), a novel whose insistence on learning and on wretched poverty seems less to transplant the heroine of Ariadnê to a new terrain than to combine its interest in archaeology with the verismo of A Village Commune. A tale of a lonely and ignorant girl who lives amongst Etruscan ruins and is used and deceived by men until she realizes their perfidy, In Maremma was later described by Marie Corelli as ‘a perfect Love-Poem’.53 Ouida had visited Rome several times: Ariadnê is set there and Friendship uses it to veil Florence. When Ouida returned in 1881, she was presented to the royal family by Lady Paget. Queen Margherita could not bear her – and, having been informed about her love for della Stufa, teased him mercilessly about it.54 Nonetheless, Ouida’s 1882 volume entitled Bimbi (‘Children’) was dedicated to the Queen’s son, Vittorio Emanuele. With these stories for children, it might be thought that Ouida was embarking on a new, non-political, direction but, since children’s stories were designed to inculcate virtue,55 we should still consider Bimbi as a way to make an impact on society by influencing the future king of Italy. Bimbi also returned Ouida to her earlier practice of collecting together short stories previously published in periodicals.56 At the same time, she was beginning to write 49 Saturday Review, 49 (28 February 1880), 88. See the edition of Moths by Natalie Schroeder, Broadview, 2005 for a selection of reviews of, context for, and commentary on the novel. 50 Art of England: Lectures given in Oxford (London: George Allen, 1883), p. 30. 51 Mary Calverley, ‘Ouida’s Knowledge of Contemporary Life’, Contemporary Review, 40 (October 1881), 564–9; a reply by Ouida was printed at end of the following issue (pp. 841–2). Both Pykett and Ambrosini comment on this debate below, pp. 148–9, 154, 170. 52 Lee, Ouida, p. 111. 53 Marie Corelli, ‘A Word about Ouida,’ Belgravia, 71 (March 1890) 362–71, p. 367. See Moody below, pp. 110–15. 54 See Lady Layard’s Journal, 14 February, 15 February and 14 September 1881; see http://www.browningguide.org/browningscircle.php (accessed 30 December 2012). 55 See J.S. Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction (Routledge, 1981). 56 Lee, Ouida, p. 114–15.

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non-fiction articles again, now with an ever clearer political purpose: the first is ‘The Future of Vivisection’, in the Gentleman’s Magazine. Soon, too, there was a poem in The Times celebrating the British victory in Egypt; Ouida had not yet become as vigorously anti-imperialist as she soon would.57 Ouida’s creative practice was changing, though the satirical side of Moths was continued by an intriguing set of society novels and shorter fictions. Assembling her series of stories for Belgravia into the collection entitled Frescoes (1883), she interspersed the novels Wanda (1883), Princess Napraxine (1884), Othmar (1885), and Guilderoy (1888/9) with forms new to her: the short closet drama Afternoon (1883), the epistolary novella A Rainy June (1885) and the presenttense novella A House Party (1886). These evince a new interest in literary forms where the narrator’s voice is effaced, the focus instead being on communication (or its lack) between characters. At the beginning of this series in 1883, at the very time that Chatto was bargaining hard to reduce the sums paid to Ouida by telling her that sales were dropping off, following a suggestion by the then unknown Marie Corelli, the firm published a collection of excerpts from her novels without consulting her: Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos was compiled by a clergyman, F. Sydney Morris. Ouida was furious, not least by being associated with the Church when she was now an avowed atheist.58 She would have been even more displeased had she known that the title of the collection was modelled on that of a similar selection from Heine – a writer she was ambivalent about – which had appeared in 1879, ‘wisdom’ in her case preceding ‘wit’. 59 Still driven by economic necessity, Ouida was beginning a new, more unstable, phase of her relationship to publishers and to genre. She had bargained hard over Othmar with Chatto and, in an attempt to escape him, had tried to return to Chapman. In the end she received £1,000 for the novel from Chatto which included the sale of serial rights: Chatto sold on these rights to Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau who, in turn, placed the novel in various provincial newspapers.60 Between September On her late politics, see King, ‘‘The Sympathetic Individualist: Ouida’s late Work and Politics’, in Victorian Literature and Culture, 39 (2011), 563–79 and Pykett below (pp. 147–63). 58 Jordan, Writings, p. 37. 59 See King, ‘Crafting’. The reference is to Wit, Wisdom and Pathos from the Prose of Heinrich Heine, with a few pieces from the ‘Book of Songs’, selected and translated by J. Snodgrass (London: Trübner and Co, 1879); cf. Wisdom, Wit and Pathos of Ouida, selected from the works of Ouida by F. Sydney Morris (Chatto & Windus) 1884. There was a craze for ‘wit and wisdom’ compilations in the later 1880s: Ouida’s is one of the earliest. Jane Jordan has described this episode, including its relation to the earlier Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in Prose and Verse, selected from the Novels of George Eliot by Alexander Main (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1873), in ‘Romans français écrits en Anglais’: Ouida, the Sensation Novel and Fin-De-Siècle Literary Censorship’, Women’s Writing, 20.2 (2013), 247–62, p. 251. 60 Othmar was serialized in 1885 at least in The Newcastle Weekly Courant (1 May–4 December); Western Mail (2 May–21 November); Glasgow Weekly Herald (2 May–21 November); Nottinghamshire Guardian (8 May–27 November). Chatto issued the volume form on 1 December 1885. 57

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1885 and April 1886, Ouida negotiated directly with Tillotson’s to sell A Rainy June, Don Gesualdo and A House Party for decent sums.61 Tillotson first sold them to various provincial newspapers,62 but, aiming to persuade the thousands of readers who only encountered fiction in newspapers to buy volumes, he also came to an agreement with the publishing firm of Maxwell to produce ‘Tillotson’s Shilling Fiction’ series: A Rainy June was to be the first in the series. After just two volumes, Tillotson quarrelled with Maxwell and switched to Routledge: hence the publication of Don Gesualdo under the latter’s imprint.63 Shortly afterwards, the firm of Maxwell was sold to Hurst and Blackett, which is why A House Party was issued by the latter.64 The society novels of the 1880s are romans-à-thèse that explore the overlap of aesthetics and politics in ways new for Ouida. Maltz illuminates several below by focussing on Ouida’s interest in Russia. Though some have been used by Talia Schaffer to support her claim that Ouida was a forgotten mother of aestheticism and Lisa Hagar has recently offered a Lacanian reading of Princess Napraxine, they remain less well-known than they might be. Pace Schaffer’s ground-breaking work, however, the novels of the 1880s do not discuss the nature of art as explicitly as the novels of the previous decade. Ouida’s fictional world of the 1880s is one where evanescent desire lends temporary value, where tactically deployed wit has no long-term strategy in an endless battle of words. It might seem a cynical and solipsistic mirror of Ouida’s own cultural production again: she is only producing amusing, ephemeral commodities. But the very bleakness and rigour of her vision constitutes a challenge to the reader to reject such speech and behaviour. Ouida has 61 See Bodleian MS. Eng. Misc.f.395/1; ff. 19–30 and Michael L. Turner, ‘Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau: Agreements with Authors’ in Studies in the Book Trade: in Honour of Graham Pollard (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society 1975), pp. 351–78. 62 A Rainy June was serialized in 1885, at least in the Leicester Chronicle and the Leicestershire Mercury (February 28–14 March); Nottinghamshire Guardian (6 March–20 March), and the Irish Fireside (2 March–23 March). Don Gesualdo ran in the same year in the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent (14 November–5 December) and again in the conservative Nottinghamshire Guardian (20 November–11 December). I have not traced where, or even if, A House Party was serialized. 63 Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 81–2. 64 The American publication history of these three novelettes is even more complicated than the British. A Rainy June appeared with two publishers in New York who specialised in cheap volumes, Lovell and Munro (rather than with Lippincott in Philadelphia, who was to bring out his own edition in 1887). Ouida had, however, been careful to maintain her relationship with Tauchnitz in her agreement with Tillotson for all three novellas. Don Gesualdo was published in New York with Lovell and, in French translation, in one episode in the Revue des Deux Mondes, November–December 1886, pp. 551–98. A House Party appeared, again with Lovell in 1886, the product of a play Ouida had tried to write for the famous actors Marie and Squire Bancroft at an inopportune moment for them (they had retired from the stage in 1885). Whether Tillotson’s sold them to Lovell is not clear.

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not at all abandoned her sympathetic ethic but is holding up a speculum stultorum to society for its failure to live up to that ethic. Society, she tells us, is now using art and artistry not to promote sympathy but as a defence against it. Elizabeth Lee wrote that some believed the eponymous protagonist of Guilderoy to have been modelled on the son of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Robert Lytton, popular poet, charming and successful diplomat and viceroy of India between 1876 and 1880. In the spring of 1884, Ouida had given a banquet for him in Florence. The two became friends and, on his return to Italy in 1886, he called on Ouida several times and invited her to visit him at his Hertfordshire estate of Knebworth.65 Just before Christmas 1886, Ouida (without her mother) arrived in London. As was noted in the press, she stayed again at the Langham.66 Previous biographers have speculated that Ouida went to England simply to see Lytton because she was infatuated with him, but a surviving letter from Richard Burton suggests she had been planning to come to London to look after her business interests for some years.67 Determined to renew her contacts, she plunged into social life again, entertaining a mixture of aristocrats, artists and litterateurs, and having her photograph taken at the well-known Elliott & Fry at their studios in nearby Baker Street (see Figure I.1). Parties and dinners were held in her honour at the French Embassy, by the Duke of Sutherland at Stafford House in St James’s, and by the economist and novelist William Mallock at the Bachelors’ Club. On 1 April 1887 she dined at the House of Commons with the Home Secretary H. Matthews. Many of these experiences were reported in the press.68 The trip was financially expensive almost to the point of ruin: not only did her Langham Hotel bill have to be paid by Lady Dorothy Nevill, but another friend from whom she had borrowed money while in Italy, the Countess de la Sizzerane, had sent her a summons for its repayment. Ouida was forced to beg W.F. Tillotson to rescue her.69 Nonetheless, the visit was, in other senses, an investment in experience which Ouida would realize in her output. Given the kind of people Ouida frequented in London, it is appropriate now to ask how we can understand Ouida’s relationship to the social sector that still comprised the powerful decision makers in British culture and society, the aristocracy. From the point of view of the aristocracy, the increasingly mediated 65 See E. Neill Raymond, Victorian Viceroy: The Life of Robert, the First Earl of Lytton (London: Regency Press, 1980), pp. 268–73. 66 See e.g. Birmingham Daily Post, 23 December 23 1886, p. 3; Bury and Norwich Post, 28 December 1886, p. 5. 67 BL Add MSS 88876, fols 124–6. 68 See e.g. Birmingham Daily Post, 18 January 1887, p. 3: ‘Ouida, or Mlle. de la Ramé, is now one of the lionesses of London Society. She is bidden to luncheons, and dinners and suppers, and there is considerable curiosity to see her.’ The Blackburn Standard, 5 February 1887, p. 3 recorded that she was making a study of London Society, and so on. 69 Jordan, Writings, pp. 49–50.

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nature of political power and the extension of the franchise needed the creative industries to validate and promote it much more broadly than once had sufficed. The Liberals had harnessed the power of popular print in the 1830s and gradually all political parties began to adopt it. The prominent Conservative hostess Lady Dorothy Nevill was one of the foremost practitioners of the new welcome extended to authors and artists in the latter part of the nineteenth century.70 That is partly why, no doubt, she and others paid Ouida’s bills: while Ouida might be rude and ‘dangerously amusing,’71 in the final analysis they understood her as a safe promoter of their order. Ouida herself was well aware of her utility to this social group: she regarded them as her patrons who had a duty to her as their client. This is partly the meaning of what is called her extravagance: refusing to manage money with bourgeois prudence and decorum despite her mediocre income, she borrowed and sometimes did not repay large sums from wealthy people she knew.72 In June 1888, a year after her return to Italy and still financially embarrassed, Ouida and her mother were evicted from the Villa Farinola because of unpaid rent.73 They moved to a grand apartment of 30 rooms in Florence, in the Palazzo Feroni on the Via de’ Serragli south of the Arno. Ouida was unhappy in Florence. She hated how the centre was being demolished and modernized.74 Then, at the end of February 1889, her beloved della Stufa died of cancer of the throat.75 His death meant that Janet Ross and her husband had to leave Castagnolo; they eventually bought a medieval castle below Fiesole, Poggio Gherardo where Janet eventually died in 1927, a wealthy widow looked after by her devoted niece Lina Waterfield and an army of servants.76 Ouida, by contrast, was offered various sensibly small places by friends and refused them all. Another death soon followed. In 1891, Robert Lytton spent several days with Ouida which they both recorded in letters with pleasure.77 He died later that year. Ouida wrote to Tauchnitz that ‘The death of my beloved friend Lord Lytton makes it impossible for me to attend to anything.’78 In May 1891, no doubt goaded by her experiences with Tillotson and Chatto, Ouida wrote a long letter to the Times complaining about changes in the relations between publisher and author, and proposing a return to older, more artisanal Mary Jeune, Memories of Fifty Years (London: Arnold, 1910), pp. 210–11. Jeune, Memories, p. 235, referring to Ouida’s letters which she burnt. 72 See, e.g. Walburga Paget, The Linings of Life (London: Hurst and Blackett 1928), 70 71

I, p. 550; Mark Holloway, Norman Douglas: a Biography (London: Secker and Warburg, 1976), pp. 140–41. 73 The story that Ouida was evicted because she refused to prune her trees is unlikely, through propagated by Lee (Ouida): the far more likely reason of unpaid rent is tactfully dealt with by Lee in a footnote on p. 141. 74 See ‘The Obliteration of Florence,’ National Review, 16 November 1890, 303–9. 75 La Nazione, 28 February 1889, p. 2 announces his death. 76 Benjamin, Castle, p. 187. 77 Ouida, letter to Mme. Tassinari quoted in Lee, Ouida, p. 144. 78 Letter quoted in Lee, Ouida, p. 145.

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and humane relations where profit was not the only goal. ‘New Literary Factors’ continued an intervention Ouida had started in the Times a month earlier, complaining about the inadequacy of the new copyright agreements with America (and with copyright in general). It occupied nearly two columns and her principal targets were the influence of what she saw as the American-inspired industrialisation of literature by those ‘who buy and sell authors as the Turf boys buy and sell a colt’: newspaper syndicates, literary agents and authors’ guilds. Her letter provoked responses from Walter Besant and Mary Braddon who defended the new system.79 Though regular salaries in return for specified numbers of words had existed for serial novelists since at least the 1840s, Ouida did her best to resist such industrial, managed production not just in newspaper and periodical articles but in reality too. In her artisanal aesthetic practice, art required (relatively) long gestation times and therefore some way to support the writer until the appearance of the next work. One could in theory rely on savings to tide one over, but this depended on a faith in an impersonal capitalism’s delayed rewards that Ouida’s experience of it belied: banks crashed, bankers ran off with ballet girls, publishers reneged on their promises. Chatto was giving her less and less while the firm’s profits from her labour were growing. In the last 15 years of her writing career, she relied mainly on short stories and essays in periodicals just as she had done at its start.80 These gave her greater economic flexibility: not only could she sell more rapidly, but to more than one publisher in more than one form. Thus ‘Tonia: a Story of Crime from Poverty’ appeared in Christmas Numbers for 1895 of both the sumptuously illustrated American Cosmopolitan and one of its British analogues, C.K. Shorter’s Sketch. It was later reprinted in La Strega and Other Stories in 1899 which came out with Sampson Low in Britain, with the faithful Tauchnitz on the Continent and with the eccentric Drexel Biddle in the US.81 To say that Ouida’s change in mode of fiction production accorded with the new general profile of publishing would certainly be exaggerated. What we see instead is Ouida’s negotiation with it: it is not what she wanted but she had no choice. The late stories of Italian life that one biographer has suggested are in dialogue with Verga and verismo,82 are mostly developments of ‘A Dog of Flanders’ and 79 The Times, 22 May 1891, p. 3. Besant’s reply appears 26 May, p. 8. Ouida’s earlier letter had appeared on 3 April, p. 13. Mary Braddon’s reply appeared in The World, 10 June 1891, p. 22 after a response by The World itself in ‘What the World Says’, 27 May 1891, p. 25. See also Hearth and Home, 28 May 1891, n.p. An earlier piece in the Saturday Review, 2 May 1891, pp. 642–3, is also part of this dialogue. Of relevance to the quotation from Ouida’s article here is that ‘Ouida’ was already in use as a name for racehorses, as the author would have known (Law, Serializing, pp. 171–2 gives an account of the exchange between Besant and Ouida very unsympathetic to the latter). 80 On the latter, see King, ‘Sympathetic Individualist’ and Pykett and Ambrosini below. See also Appendix 2. 81 Cosmopolitan, 20.2 (December 1895), 190–207; The Sketch, 25 December 1895, pp. 3–11. 82 Stirling, Fine and Wicked, p. 149; cf. Ambrosini, p. 171 below.

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A Village Commune combined with the travelogue descriptions familiar since Pascarel: they are elegantly written sentimental protests against the selfishness, greed and drive for modernity that sweep away the weak and picturesque without thought of its historical and aesthetic value. In this sense they are fictional versions of Ouida’s essays. But to describe them in this way does not do them justice as, through written for commercial ends, they convey their message very effectively. Critics on the whole liked them, although G.K. Chesterton, in his capacity as reader for Unwin, would be mercilessly witty in his report on one of Ouida’s works in this vein, her last completed novel, The Waters of Edera (1900): ‘age does not wither nor custom stale her infinite lack of variety’.83 For Chesterton she may be a music hall Cleopatra – a version of the pub landlady I referred to in the Introduction – but Unwin published the novel to the critics’ delight.84 Back in 1892, Ouida, financially embarrassed as always, was looking over villas to rent, at least once accompanied by Lady Paget.85 The following year, she moved to Villa Del Corona, an impractical, very large and neglected building almost devoid of furniture.86 Ouida’s mother, now aged 80, had taken a fall in the spring and since then been very ill. In August, Ouida begged for urgent help from Tauchnitz, claiming that she feared they would be thrown out in six days if she didn’t pay the rent. Tauchnitz obliged as he usually did. Six weeks later, on September 10, Susan Ramé died. Ouida could not afford to bury her and kept her body upstairs in the villa. Eventually there was no other choice than to bury her in the pauper’s section of the Allori Cemetery outside Florence. Ouida was distraught. The icy Lady Paget went to see her twice ‘to condole’. Paget describes Ouida in great distress and unable to maintain the social niceties of formal visiting. Paget now broke with her, the immediate stimulus being ‘an insolent letter saying it was entirely [Paget’s daughter] Gay’s fault that her mother had died from destitution.’ This was an accusation that Paget felt unfair since Gay’s husband had some time previously given Ouida 30,000 francs. ‘I did not answer,’ Paget continues, ‘but never went again, and some months after she was evicted by the Carabinieri for not paying her rent.’87 Just on the point of her eviction in the spring of 1894, Ouida received a visit from none other than ‘Contessa’ Marie Corelli and her companion Bertha Vyver. The following day Corelli sent her a huge bouquet: Ouida replied with a brief declaration of her aesthetic and ethical credo: ‘I thank you very much for your pretty thought of flowers. You already gave me one very rare flower – sympathy’.88 The Chesterton reader’s report is quoted by Lee, Ouida, p. 175. See e.g. Daily News, 23 February 1900, p. 6; Morning Post, 15 February 1900, p. 2:

83 84

Even Punch, 14 March 1900, p. 182 appreciated it. 85 Paget, Linings I, p. 550. 86 Paget describes a visit there in the spring of 1893 (Embassies of Other Days. [London: Hutchinson & Co, 1923], p. 552). 87 Paget, In My Tower (London: Hutchinson, 1924), 1, p. 52 (see also p. 16). 88 Eileen Bigland, Marie Corelli: The Woman and the Legend (London: Jarrolds, 1953), p. 153. See also Moody below.

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Ouida, now alone apart from her maid Gori, went to Lucca where she found a villa in S. Alessio, a straggle of houses just over the river to the north east of the city. The Villa Massoni was owned by a neighbour, Mme. Grosfils, the Italian wife of the Belgian consul. ‘[I]t is quite out of the world – my world’ Ouida wrote to Tauchnitz in 1896. ‘Perhaps so much the better’.89 She had few visitors. One of the most significant was Wilfred Scawen Blunt, whose relationship to Ouida Ambrosini describes below. Throughout the 1890s she continued her series of stories and articles and wrote the satirical novel The Massarenes (1897). The articles are discussed by Pykett below and by me elsewhere along with The Massarenes, so I shall not dwell on them here.90 Maltz has also elsewhere ably elucidated Ouida’s last long novella/short novel The Waters of Edera (1900).91 As far as her publishing contacts are concerned, Ouida developed a relationship with the publisher Unwin, but it was never as stable as with Chapman & Hall or Chatto & Windus. She even deserted Lippincott in 1894 and experimented with the new American company Biddle as well as with the only very slightly older company of Fenno. While she became a regular contributor to a limited number of respectably intellectual journals, she constantly migrated for her volume form publications from one publisher to the next. This is hard to interpret given the paucity of materials, but one can assume that, despite her continued good sales in the cheaper end of the market, the value of her new work had diminished and she was constantly looking for higher prices. By the early years of the twentieth century, Ouida was publishing very little. Are we to interpret this as tiredness, failure of courage or the result of the traumatic events that occurred in the last years of her life? Perhaps all three, but in fact Ouida did not stop writing in 1900: she instead focussed on political poems and letters to her acquaintances that often demanded or at least discussed social and political intervention on a micro or macro scale.92 A few poems appeared in The Times; others, considered libellous, remain in manuscript form, including ‘Victoria R. & I. (31 December 1900)’, an indictment of the Boer war written while Victoria was on her death bed.93 These poems – when they have been mentioned at all – Letter dated 16 September 1896, quoted in Lee, Ouida, p. 157. See King, ‘Sympathetic Individualist’ and introduction to The Massarenes (2011). 91 See Diana Maltz, ‘Ouida, “Impossible” Socialism, and the Appeal of Anarchism’, 89 90

Anglistica Pisana, 6.1/2 (2009), 99–106. 92 On the small scale, see, e.g. the undated latter to Lady Carnarvon (‘I venture to send you the enclosed heartrending account as I know of yr. kindness and generosity for this suffering district’; Carnarvon Papers, vol. CIX, BL Add MSS 60865, fol. 143); on the large see, for example, many of Ouida’s letters to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt such as the one dated 10 Sept [1901] where she describes the furious reaction of Rennell Rodd, then a diplomat in Egypt, when she sent him an anti-imperialist pamphlet (West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, Blunt MSS, Box 47). 93 See Lee, Ouida, pp. 183–5. She prints ‘a few lines, which may perhaps be quoted without offence’ which differ significantly from the version sent to Blunt, 6 January 1901 (West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, Blunt MSS, Box 47).

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have been taken as examples of how little Ouida knew of real political process.94 But we might also read them as proof of Ouida’s commitment to art as a political intervention beyond commercial exchange; that is, how Ouida came to use poetry and correspondence, both public and private, as the least commercially profitable modes of writing to make political statements in order to locate her art beyond exchange value into pure utility. This steely ethical position that completely repudiated concern for ‘popularity’ was not new, of course: textually, Ouida had always promoted the idea of the genius above and against the market even if she had not herself always put it into practice. The trope now validated the reality of her market position through aesthetic and political discourses rather than through the quantitative emphasis of the market: her value was not monetary. Furthermore, her confinement to correspondence meant a focus on the personal and a rejection of the impersonal relationships she now entertained with most publishers and, indeed, with her thousands of unknown readers. That is not to say that Ouida altogether repudiated the quantitative relations she had aggressively engaged in up to this point. She was indeed lucky in her last publisher, especially given the problems she faced with accommodation and deteriorating health in the last four years of her life, in that they, like Tauchnitz, combined an interest in the quantitative and the personal. Ouida had paid eight years rent in advance for the Villa Massoni. In 1903 Mme. Grosfils wanted the villa back after the expiry of the lease and persuaded Montgomery Carmichael, the British consul in Livorno, to act as intermediary. Ouida refused to move and so Mme. Grosfils procured an eviction order for 17 November 1903. A day early, however, the Grosfils sons broke into the Villa Massoni with a gang of roughs, forcibly took all Ouida’s possessions – letters and manuscripts included – drank and sang until 2 am while Ouida and Gori were locked in an upstairs room. At 7 am the next morning, allowing them to take nothing except some linen and the dogs, the gang pushed the women into a small carriage.95 Ouida and Gori went to the Hotel de Russie, Baedeker’s recommended hotel on the seafront of Viareggio.96 There Ouida sought to recover from the violence while instituting a court case for the recovery of her possessions. She also had to try to reconstruct from memory her latest novel, Helianthus, which had been contracted to Macmillan in March for £750.97 As the court case was costly and protracted – exacerbated by two appeals from the Grosfils – Ouida had to beg Macmillan for advances, a hundred pounds here and fifty there, sending the manuscript piecemeal as guarantee that it would, eventually, arrive at completion. In fact, she gave little in return and Helianthus remained unfinished at her death. Macmillan in the end generously gave her two hundred pounds more than the sum originally agreed. Lee, Ouida, p. 183; Stirling, Fine and Wicked, 204. Letter to Tauchnitz June 1905, quoted in Lee, Ouida, p. 193. 96 On the Hotel de Russie, see Baedeker, Handbook for Travellers: Northern Italy 94 95

(Leipsig: Baedeker, 1899), p. 121. 97 See BL Add MSS 54964, contract with Macmillan signed by Ouida 18 March 1903; on her reconstruction of the MS, see letter to Macmillan dated 3 May 1904.

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Ouida won all the court appeals against the Grosfils and the case was eventually concluded in June 1905: she was to have her possessions returned and her extensive legal costs repaid. The Grosfils sons were sentenced to prison, but a royal act of clemency commuted the sentence to a fine. The Grosfils promptly fled the country without paying it. Ouida never recovered her possessions, the further civil action for damages and recovery continuing for six years after her death. Meanwhile, during the first series of legal proceedings, Ouida and Gori moved frequently. After their initial stay in Viareggio, they escaped the heat (and the higher prices of the tourist season) by repairing to the mountain spa town of Bagni di Lucca.98 Its winter climate did not agree with Ouida; she was very ill with typhus and malaria, fell and hurt her eyes, and suffered from pleurisy. She found Bagni sunless and claimed she only stayed to attend the hearings (the law court was situated there).99 After her legal victory, Ouida returned to Viareggio in the summer of 1905 and subsequently took a small villa in Camaiore, a village in the hills above the resort. In December, Ouida was awarded £300 from the Royal Literary Fund.100 Eleven months later, she lost the power of sight in her right eye; her letters suggest that she knew well that her career, dependent on her sight because she was unable to afford an amanuensis, was really at an end.101 In April 1907, the Consul Montgomery Carmichael acted as intermediary for a publishing house asking for her memoirs. She refused, calling memoirs in general ‘base betrayals of others’.102 Ouida passed the summer before she died in a small house in the quiet hamlet of Massarosa where the hills meet the plain behind Viareggio. She was still remembered in Bury St Edmund’s. George Gery [sic] Milner-GibsonCullum, who had inherited Hardwick Hall near Bury, had been writing to Ouida occasionally for a few years. In the spring of 1907 he invited her to a festival in the town in July. Ouida, unable to accept for reasons both of health and finance, amused herself by imagining that, had it been possible, she would have come as the ‘Contessa di Sant’ Alessio’ and spent her time ‘talk[ing] of Ouida and abusing her’.103 Less amusing was an intrusion by the popular press. On 12 July 1907, Harmsworth’s Daily Mail – then the best-selling paper in Britain and one that On the reasons for Ouida’s stay in Bagni, see Wolseley papers, Hove Central Reference Library, items 24 and 31, letters to Lady Wolseley 3 April [1904] and 15 June 1904. On Bagni as an escape from summer heat, see e.g. Black’s Guide to Italy (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1869), p. 120. 99 Letters to Macmillan dated 25 November 1904, 27 November 1904, 22 October 1905, BL Add MSS 54964; see also Wolseley papers, Hove Central Reference Library, items 24 and 31, letters to Lady Wolseley dated 3 April [1904] and 15 June 1904; Cullum Bequest, Trinity College Library Cambridge, P. 3.1 [letter undated but probably late 1905]. 100 British Library, Royal Literary Fund Application 2714. 101 Letters to Macmillan dated BL Add MSS 54964; Letter to Cockerell dated February 1907, BL Add MSS 52744. 102 Lee, Ouida, p. 220. 103 Cullum Bequest, Trinity College Library Cambridge, P. 3.1. 98

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Ouida’s erstwhile hero Lord Salisbury called ‘a newspaper for office boys written by office boys’ 104 – published an article entitled ‘Ouida in Want’. The next day the Mail published a letter from Marie Corelli suggesting that the paper should set up a fund to aid Ouida in her distress. Corelli wrote that she herself was sending £25 ‘in full anticipation that a Fund [would] be started.’105 Ten days later, the entire front page of Harmsworth’s picture-heavy Daily Mirror (according to its masthead ‘the morning journal with the second largest net sale’) was splashed with what purported to be a portrait of Ouida reading in the garden of her house. On page 9, three more photographs claimed to be of ‘Ouida’s Home and the Dogs she loves’, a cross marking the upstairs room in which she was supposed to spend ‘almost every hour of her life.’ Though ill, Ouida was undaunted at the prospect of taking on the publishing industry again. Furious, she ensured that both the British and Italian press knew about the falsity of the Harmsworth coverage.106 She wrote to Unwin in August that a ‘young correspondent of the D.M. called and wanted to see [her; she] did not receive him; this was his vengeance. The ‘portrait’ so called by the Daily Mirror is an invention.’107 Various friends and acquaintances rallied round. Vernon Lee wrote a laudatory article in the Westminster Gazette in which she claims she had sent a nurse friend (perhaps her lover, Kit Anstruther-Thompson) to see Ouida.108 Frank Harris, who had been editor of the Fortnightly Review when Ouida had started publishing there, encouraged her to take the papers to court for libel, and publically supported her in his Society journal, Vanity Fair.109 The same month of July, she received news that she had been awarded a Civil List pension of £150 a year. She was not grateful, though the press, including the Illustrated London News, felt she well deserved it.110 In September, sick with pneumonia, she returned to Viareggio, to 70 via Zanardelli, a three-storey lowermiddle-class apartment building on the corner of a street leading towards the sea. It is part-rusticated, solid and possessed of a reasonably-sized corner balcony on the first floor: it was never a ‘tenement’ (as has been claimed in a Harmsworth-style captatio benevolentiae that even the ODNB biography of Ouida reproduces111). 104 Dennis Griffiths, Fleet Street, Five Hundred Years of the Press (London: British Library, 2006), p. 131. 105 Marie Corelli, ‘Ouida: An Appeal to Her Readers’, Daily Mail, 13 July 1907, p. 7. 106 See Ouida, ‘Letter to the Editor’ in The Times, 17 July 1907, p. 9 and in the Court Circular (19 July 1907), p. 10. 107 Quoted in Lee, Ouida, pp. 226–7. See also ‘Ouida and Journalism’, Florence Herald (17 September 1907) p. 8. 108 See Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 340, n. 8. 109 See Jordan, Writings, pp. 92–4. On Vanity Fair, see DNCJ, p. 651. 110 Illustrated London News, 31 July 1907, p. 48. 111 Helen Killoran, ‘Ramée, Marie Louise de la [Ouida] (1839–1908)’, first published 2004; online edn, May 2006, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/32772 (accessed 21 December 2012).

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It is, however, ironic that the street is named after an Italian Prime Minister of whom Ouida thoroughly disapproved (see Ambrosini, p. 173, below). Ouida died of pneumonia on 25 January 1908. The next day the Florentine daily La Nazione, which had discretely mentioned her beloved della Stufa’s death on an inside page, carried almost a column about hers on its front – no doubt intended to promote and validate its translated serialization of Under Two Flags which it was running as part of an on-going call to Italy to colonise North Africa.112 The same day, Montgomery Carmichael, Ouida’s executor, read Frank Harris’s most recent letter explaining that the Daily Mirror would give her £100 compensation and an apology. As was his duty as consul, Carmichael arranged her burial in the Protestant English Cemetery at Bagni di Lucca after her body had been photographed.113 A telegraphed report in the Daily Mail confirms the small number of mourners, adding that Carmichael and the popular novelist William Le Queux laid wreaths.114 Later that year an elegant tombstone was paid for by an anonymous French noble woman,115 and Macmillan and Tauchnitz brought out Helianthus unfinished. More curiously, in June 1909 Lippincott’s and the National Review published Ouida’s first essay on ‘The Woman Problem’ which she had written in 1883 but directed to be published after her death.116 Montgomery Carmichael still had Ouida’s creditors and the continuing Grosfils civil action before him, a case only resolved in 1914. Ouida’s chattels were auctioned by the Pretura di Viareggio on 18 March 1915. Amongst them was the copyright to Two Little Wooden Shoes which sold for 4000 lire to the musical publishing house of Ricordi: Puccini wanted to write an opera based on it, but in the end Lodoletta was written by his friend and rival Mascagni.117 Chatto & Windus, meanwhile, were continuing to reprint in many thousands their Ouida copyrights in cheap editions, and the Daily Mirror, confident that its readers would know who and what Ouida was after its supposed photographs of the previous year, raised a subscription for a monument in Bury St Edmund’s that not only provided a public relations stunt for itself but would root an errant daughter in the birthplace she had fled almost 40 years previously.118 La Nazione, 26 gennaio 1908, p. 1. On the paper’s imperialist stance, see Luigi Salvatorelli, ‘La Politica Estera.’ in Alfio Russo et al., La Nazione nei suoi cento anni 1859– 1959 (Bologna: Società per azioni polifragici, 1959), 133–64, pp. 153–9. 113 Letter from Carmichael to George Gery Milner-Gibson-Cullum, Cullum Bequest, Trinity College Library Cambridge, P.3.4, dated 21 March 1910. 114 Daily Mail, 28 January 1908, p. 1. 115 Letter from Carmichael to Milner-Gibson-Cullum, Cullum bequest, Trinity College Library Cambridge, P.3.26, dated 17 February 1908. 116 See Jordan, Writings, pp. 325–35. 117 Cesare Orselli’s ‘Vicende operistiche di Due zoccoletti’, Anglistica Pisana, 6.1/2 (2009), 25–36, p. 25. 118 ‘Competition for a Memorial to “Ouida”’, Royal Society of British Sculptors: Minutes of Council Meetings, 11 May 1908, available at Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951, http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/ event.php?id=msib2_1221563921 (accessed 21 December 2012). 112

Fig. 2.1

A Village Commune, cover, Chatto & Windus, 2 shilling yellowback, 1882

Chapter 2

Ouida and the Canon: Recovering, Reconsidering, and Revisioning the Popular Pamela K. Gilbert

In my first book, on Ouida, Braddon and Broughton, I was determined to address these understudied authors with the same seriousness of purpose and method with which I might have approached Dickens – or Milton. Just how problematic that commitment still was in 1997 was brought home to me the year the book came out, when I interviewed for a position (not the one I currently hold) at a flagship state university. ‘You have written on several of these women authors’, observed one bemused potential colleague, ‘But can you teach Dickens?’ Not long after, a group of women scholars in the process of assembling a collection on nineteenthcentury women and feminism sent out a call for proposals. I responded, pointing out that it would be interesting to have Ouida in the mix, as she had voiced some strong opinions on women’s rights. As they were not familiar with Ouida, I quoted some of those opinions. The editors were politely horrified. Ouida was not at all what they had in mind. And they were right; though their description of the volume had initially failed to convey it to me, their purpose was really to assemble essays on women who were themselves politically and actively feminist. Ouida, though she was one of ‘these women authors,’ was evidently not one of those women authors. Ouida, then, and the history of her reception, makes for a most interesting case study some decade and a half after my interview encounter, and over one hundred years after her death in Italy. Initially identified as a sensation novelist, she also looks back toward the earlier popular genre, the novel of high life. She maintained her popularity with a generation of writers in the 1890s with some of whom she had little sympathy, ranging from Corelli to Beerbohm. Recuperated by some critics as (problematically) feminist, she is nonetheless most virulently dismissive of ‘ordinary’ women, and most especially the ‘New Woman’, which term she has been charged with coining. She also wrote her most transgressive women at a time when she was writing, she averred, ‘for the soldiers’. That said, her novels do abound with bad female subjects, who often lead quite happy lives without ever becoming exactly good subjects – or at least, good in the ways we are taught to expect in

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Victorian domestic fiction.1 Her move away from novels of high life and toward more overtly political Italian novels has been largely ignored by the feminist critics who address her earlier sensation novels. Reading these novels further complicates our understanding of how gender and other political issues were interrelated at the time. Reviled by some critics and adored by her readers, Ouida has much to teach us of the vexed class and gender politics of her period, just as her reception in recent years teaches us about our own contradictory investment in a literary form considered inherently bourgeois and conservative, and reveals the ways we simultaneously demand innovation within and resistance to bourgeois ideals. In 1977, Showalter’s magisterial A Literature of Their Own identified Ouida as part of a generation who challenged the ideal of decorously ‘feminine’ novelists who preceded them. They ‘expressed female anger, frustration, and sexual energy more directly than had been done before’.2 Showalter sees this group of novelists as expressive of a phase of protest that would eventually spark more actively feminist writers. The 1980s and ’90s saw critics labouring to recuperate these proto-feminist writers. In 1988, Natalie Schroeder’s early work on Ouida’s and Braddon’s sensation novels emphasized the eroticism and assertiveness of their women characters, and saw in these elements a feminist tendency.3 This was an important step in drawing attention to Ouida’s writing. But in the ’80s, not many scholars were working on Ouida, and in 1996, Carol Poster warned that feminist critics were turning away from recovery work that was still far from finished: ‘[T]here are far more Dickens scholars . . . than there are Braddon or Ouida scholars. . . . Ouida . . . is a non-literary author because, despite enormous sales figures, her books have not been widely discussed by literary critics. … she is therefore not [considered] a legitimate subject for scholarly articles’ in literary studies, only in women’s studies or journals of popular culture.4

In short, it was not long ago that one had to justify paying attention to popular women authors at all, and finding a feminist foremother was one way to argue for their significance on extra-aesthetic grounds. 1 I am using the term ‘good subject’ in the sense Nancy Armstrong uses it in How Novels Think, in which she argues that the typical trajectory of the realist novel is to begin with a bad subject (an individual in opposition to the social order) and then bring his or her excessive individualism into reconciliation with the social order, rendering the subject ‘good’ – and no longer interesting, at which point the narrative ends. Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 7–9. 2 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontё to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 160. 3 Natalie Schroeder, ‘Feminine Sensationalism, Eroticism and Self-assertion: M.E. Braddon and Ouida’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 7.1 (1988), 87–103. 4 Carol Poster, ‘Oxidation is a Feminist Issue: Acidity, Canonicity, and Popular Victorian Female Authors’, College English, 58.3 (1996), 287–306, p. 294.

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1990s readings of Ouida, influenced by the emerging scholarship on sensation and on the New Woman,5 tended either to find her 1860s novels filled with unconventional, strong (feminist-ish) characters, or to worry about her embarrassing later tirades against the New Woman. Talia Schaffer, in 2000, addressed this problem specifically in the latter type of readings, pointing out that this was reductive of the complex attitudes both of Ouida and of the ‘New Women’ themselves. Still, her strategy to redirect the conversation was to relocate Ouida from the New Woman debates into an alternative tradition of fin de siècle studies in which she could be read as a more progressive foremother: aestheticism. Schaffer focused on Ouida’s ‘strong female figure’ of the 1880s,6 which in a sense was a reworking of the strategies used to advocate for Ouida’s sensation. Schaffer’s argument placing Ouida as an aesthete is completely persuasive to me, but for our purposes here, it did not get us far from the strong-woman-character litmus test. The critics of this period were caught between competing imperatives: demand that the works of these women be read on their own terms and risk being a voice crying in a largely uninhabited wilderness; or try to shoehorn them into existing justifications for attention, either of innovation, illumination of existing canonical texts, or aesthetic quality. Often this results in a rather apologetic rhetoric – Poster herself, after her fiery start, ends up arguing that ‘not all of Ouida’s novels merit dismissal,’ as many of her women ‘remain strong’ (309). One can see this conflicted rhetoric in many critical works of this period, including mine. We were fighting three battles, the first two of which had to be fought just to get the author an audience: first, to justify attention to a woman author as a feminist foremother; second, to justify the relation of that author to a ‘great tradition’ in which aesthetic innovation and filiation are important measures of evaluation. But women’s writing and popular writing often cannot be read within these categories of filiation. Their relation to the great tradition may be hazy, epigonal, or simply absent. Viewed in an evolutionary narrative, they may appear to lack clear parentage or to be barren of progeny. The tastes they reflect are often not easily accessible to readers now. Thus our third battle was to find a mode of reading that fully respected the complexities of our subject. And this battle we are still fighting. Both postcolonial and Foucaultian work over the past decades has encouraged us to look for both complicity with and resistance to power in the same text. Ouida was not feminist as we understand that term, but she is also not anti-feminist as we understand that vexed idea either. In 1997, I noted that, politically, Ouida’s stated position was rather ultra-Tory than Whiggish or even conservative; Ouida’s radicalism was, I suggested, largely aesthetic, as it was art that transcended and leveled social and gender distinctions.7 As for her politics, even in her own day Ann Heilmann, ‘The “New Woman” Fiction and Fin-de-Siècle Feminism’, Women’s Writing, 3.3 (1996), 197–216. 6 Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 35. 7 Pamela K. Gilbert, Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5

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readers found her a puzzle to sort out, and she herself, whether with malice or naiveté or simple sincerity, pronounced herself morally rather than ideologically driven: No one can accuse me of any political prejudices. My writings have alternately been accused of a reactionary conservatism and a dangerous socialism, so that I may without presumption claim to be impartial: I love conservatism when it means the preservation of beautiful things, I love revolution when it means the destruction of vile ones.8

It is perhaps not surprising that we would be thus tangled within the contradictions of the feminist literary-critical position. Just as nineteenth-century women’s activism began often by claiming a special ‘standpoint epistemology’ on ‘women’s issues’ which entailed what we now see as a problematic relinquishment of issues defined as ‘public’ in favour of those that could be framed as ‘domestic,’ feminist attempts to establish a filiation of mothers based on the maps of misprision that validate canonical traditions are bound to run afoul of alternate modes of mapping history. We tend to look for writers we can read into a narrative of progress ending in, well, us – precursors to a stance we think of as ‘our’ feminism. And as literary critics, many of us were trained to look for writers we can read into the tradition recognized as ‘great’ under new criticism – that is, the one that culminated in early twentieth century modernism, that validated realism, continuity, complexity, universality and contemplative interiority. But Victorian popular modes often were not framed within those values. They were frequently based on melodramatic oppositions, episodic set pieces, stark contrasts, the pleasure of contemporary (and fleeting) references and emotional responsiveness in the moment. These are not qualities prized by literary critics, though they are still prized by television writers and opera fans. The characters of Ouida were largely loved not for their complexity, but for their reliability. We today often find complexity in them, in part by reading against the grain – and that complexity is truly there. But it is in some cases incidental to the success of her novels on the terms of their original production and consumption. Her representations of class and gender are, in an important sense, true. That is, they are not realistic in the sense that people necessarily acted or spoke in the ways she portrays, but they are true in the sense that they encode fantasies, desires, resentments and the realities of power relations in ways that were perfectly legible to her audience. In some ways it bespeaks a failure of imagination on the part of critics to fault this literature for being unrealistic; you may as well ask for realism from the Faerie Queene. Joanna Russ showed us long ago that to apply the canons of the canon to works outside it is a quick way of excluding a lot of voices.9 We  need a method of reading appropriate to the object – especially when that object is ‘popular’ fiction. 8 Ouida, A Village Commune: Ouida’s Works, 10 vols (New York: P.F. Collier, 1889), V, pp. 214–15. 9 Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).

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The term popular is often applied both anachronistically and historically at once – Victorians used the term, and so do we, but not always for the same things. Canonical narratives were often as popular as the ones we now identify as such, if we are considering numbers of readers. But popular for Victorian critics (as today) often refers to class – as in, of the populace, vulgar. It can also refer to writing that seems related to what we (bizarrely) call ‘genre’ fiction (romance, mystery, etc.). Or it can refer to all of these characteristics at once. In sentimental literature and in melodrama, often the cumulative judgment of a character’s actions is less significant than the response to individual episodic set pieces; one might think of Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard,10 who sometimes is morally heroic and sometimes villainous, and is appealing in each scene for reasons that, in a realist narrative, would ask us to reconcile completely opposing understandings of the character over the course of the narrative as a whole. Ouida, writing in a period of high realism, and conforming much more to its dictates than, for example, Ainsworth, is rendered thus more susceptible to comparison with the products of that mode of writing against which she most suffers. Ouida’s lyrical and repetitive prose, her gorgeous and improbable descriptions were valued by readers then in proportion to their seeming ‘bad taste’ now. Also, it may be necessary to evaluate a contradictory figure like Ouida’s contribution to women’s culture not merely by her position visà-vis the New Woman (true foe or secret fan?) but by individual narratives and the specific situation they address, and readers’ understandings of them. Few critics have addressed her sentimental stories in the mid-to-later period of her life, and the Italian novels have fallen between critical stools today, although some early twentieth-century writers and critics considered those her best works. These novels were sentimental and sometimes melodramatic in character, simple in structure, and full of biting social criticism. As I suggested, we tend to be bound by models of filiation both as feminists and as literary critics, and the sentimental novel seems a barren dead end if one seeks its progeny in the high-culture canon. But domestic and realist genres have been extensively critiqued as a project of capitalist modernity, celebrating a middle-class interiority and model of successful integration through a possessive individualist narrative. Perhaps one answer to these criticisms is to look at the other forms contemporary with the development of realism, and seek in them an alternative narrative (or perhaps the same narrative, in which case the realist novel does not bear the burden of bourgeois complicity alone). If realism celebrated the realm of the domestic as an adequate and morally superior alternative to the market red in tooth and claw, while shoring up the necessity of such a division of public and private, it is perhaps sentimentalism that most demands a realization of the imbrication of the public and domestic. Sentimentalism has been seen as accessory to domestic realism’s valorization of the emotions and interiority, as it often exalts the family unit as the primary seat of morality. But it can also emphasize larger communal affective ties. Glenn Hendler 10 Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard, eds Manuelo Mourao and Edward Jacobs (Peterborough, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

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has argued that in the admittedly different context of nineteenth-century America, ‘sympathy . . . was a paradigmatically public sentiment’ which used ‘structures of feeling’ in sentimental fiction to constitute a ‘sentimental politics of affect.’11 Additionally, sentimentalism, which relies less on narratives of interiority and development and more on simple moral oppositions and on sympathy, to some extent refuses the bourgeois project of possessive individualism in favour of, again, communal mores (hence, it was particularly beloved by certain socialist projects of the twentieth century). But the point here is not to declare sentimentalism a better or worse mode than realism, nor is it to recuperate Ouida’s complicated (and perhaps sometimes confused) politics. The point is twofold: to recuperate an alternative history of narrative itself in the period, identifying some of the considerations which drove readers’ assessment of its stylistic norms, and to address some texts that remain, after all recuperative efforts, largely invisible among us. The first focus yields observations which can be useful with a range of texts, Dickens as well as ‘these women’. But the second is more specific, asking us to attend to the forgotten. In this sense, I am, after a delay of some years, taking Carol Poster’s charge to critics very seriously; I intend to recuperate a nearly lost group of texts. Sentimentalism has been, of all modes of narration that have fallen from grace, the most generally reviled by ‘serious’ critics. I call it a mode of narration because sentimentalism, whether in the form of sentimental set-pieces, plots or narrative passages, runs through much nineteenth-century fiction we might label under other terms (sensation, realism, etc.). But there are also novels so dominated by sentimentalism that they can be designated as belonging to a genre: Ouida’s A Village Commune is one such example. Sentimentalism was denigrated both as popular (in the vulgar sense) and as politically backward by moderns; many readers after modernism feel, with Jean Cocteau, that, ‘[e]motion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.’12 Whether sentimentalism is seen as naïve, and therefore unartistic, or as manipulative, commercial and dishonest, it is certainly viewed askance. As Cocteau suggests, the emotional response of the reader or viewer is also seen as dishonest or inauthentic, and often as directed to destructive ends or no ends at all. Or more flatly, as Carl Jung sums it up: ‘sentimentality is sister to brutality, and the two are never very far apart.’13 Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 12, p. 22. 12 I am indebted to colleague and librarian John Van Hook at the University of Florida for any number of things, including specifically locating the source of this in the original French, which is ‘L’émotion qui résulte d’une oeuvre d’art ne compte que si elle n’est pas obtenue par un chantage sentimental.’ That quotation appeared in Das APCS Bulletin, ‘Avis officiel de l’Association des Professeurs de Chante de Suisse’ 40 (September 1998), in the lead article, ‘Rhetorique et poetique de la melodie française,’ by Vincent Vives. Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et l’Arlequin (Paris: Stock, 1993), p. 47. 13 Carl Jung, The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 428. 11

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Still, the sentimental mode of narration has received a good deal of attention in its own right from critics more sensitive to gender, though it has not traditionally been discussed with reference to Ouida. It differs from the sensational and the melodramatic, though it is often used as well within each of those genres, or within realism for that matter. As one moves away from criticism of Ouida’s early sensational narratives, or Schaffer’s reading of her into the aesthetic tradition, we are faced with slim pickings. Again, by the canons of realism these texts seem naïve and exaggerated. But sentimentalism and melodrama, which use exaggeration and repetition to build emotional power, are damaged and diluted by complexity of character, whereas they can thrive on complexity of plot or on repetition, both of which can be used to defer and amplify emotional intensity. Melodrama relies, finally, on extreme oppositions and on the tendency to reinforce justice: the evil are punished and the good rewarded. Even if, tragically, the good aren’t rewarded, the evil are exposed, and community and morality restored. In sentimental discourse, the plot structure may be melodramatic or it may not – the good may simply suffer unavenged to the end of the chapter. However, there is still something like a moral resolution; it is simply turned outward to the audience, as readers are to take the moral to heart and emotionally ‘do justice’ to the underappreciated sufferer. Ouida’s novels are often melodramatic, using sentimental modes of narration, but are sometimes more wholly sentimental, even in plot structure. Criticism of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction and poetry has followed a similar, though not identical, path as that of sensation, though such scholarship has been most prominent on the American side, or in eighteenth-century British and Continental literary scholarship. Identified initially as a feminized genre, it was famously denounced in 1977 by Ann Douglas in The Feminization of Culture,14 and then recuperated in the mid-eighties by Jane Tompkins (1985) and Cathy Davidson (1986)15 as significant both as women’s literature per se and as having broader connections to the public sphere than previously thought. A number of critics from the late eighties to the turn of the millenium, such as Dobson (1997), Burgett (1998) and Hendler (2001)16 have continued the trend of considering the sentimental discourse important to the constitution of the public, and have also partially detached it from its feminized associations, which were historically specific and shifted dramatically over time. The most successful work on the genre of sentimentalism in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British and continental literature takes the work on its own terms, and interrogates its successes rather than denouncing its failure to be ‘realistic’. Jane Tompkins and Anne Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977). Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction,

14 15

1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 16 Joanne Dobson, ‘Reclaiming Sentimental Literature’, American Literature, 69.2 (1997), 263–88, p. 266; Bruce Burget, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early American Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments.

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Cathy N. Davidson have both argued that these novels portray issues of particular meaning to nineteenth-century women. As Joanne Dobson points out, Literary sentimentalism … is premised on an emotional and philosophical ethos that celebrates human connection, both personal and communal, and acknowledges the shared devastation of affectional loss. It is not a discrete literary category … but rather an imaginative orientation characterized by certain themes, stylistic features, and figurative conventions.17

Other critics have done much to show the connection between sentiment and the public sphere, particularly in American literature – as is well known, Stowe mobilizes outrage on slavery’s assault on the familial (and particularly maternal bond) and on feminine sexual virtue – issues relegated to the feminized domain of the intimate to address a political question (abolition) in the public sphere. Finally, the sentimental novel does not necessarily celebrate the character’s successful coming to terms with and integration into society. As Margaret Cohen notes of French ‘sentimental social novels,’ that is, sentimental novels devoted to the plight of the oppressed, they ‘contest the realist glorification of the struggle to rise to the top. … But if lost illusions are the key to success in realism, the experience destroys the sentimental social protagonist.’18 Ouida’s A Village Commune is in the sentimental social novel tradition. Realism, with its focus on bildung, and sensation, with its focus on the resolution of a mystery, both tend to be representable by a developmental arc. But often, sentimental texts rely less on a linear development of plot than on the repetition of a single theme. In A Village Commune, the syndic, rejected by a local peasant girl, spends his time fining and jailing her family for minor infractions until they are utterly impoverished and ruined. His henchman also manages to kill all their dogs, at suitably heart-searing intervals. In addition to his sexual persecution of the girl, he is driven by a self-righteous belief in the necessity and virtue of what he does: bringing the peasantry into line with the discipline required to modernize the country. Here, there are no strong women characters, in fact, no heroes of any kind – only innocent victims and viciously self-righteous bureaucrats. If the realist novel tends to celebrate the nuclear family as a pillar of a workable society, with the State as the patriarch, sentimental novels may emphasize the importance of the extended family and community and relation to landscape and history, de‑emphasizing – perhaps even demonizing – the state, history and the public sphere. A Village Commune is ironically named; it is the government of the commune that is breaking the bonds of community and destroying the village environment, diverting the course of the river, destroying the forests for logging and polluting the air with factories that destroy the traditional livelihood of the Italian peasantry. Interestingly, although the novel denounces socialism and especially anarchism at every turn, it reads like a socialist tract (with the possible Dobson, ‘Reclaiming Sentimental Literature’, p. 266. Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton

17 18

University Press, 1999), p. 131.

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exception of its antimodern nostalgia for a primitive agricultural lifestyle). We can see this novel in the tradition of the sentimental social problem novel of the Michael Armstrong and Mary Barton type, though of course Gaskell’s novel is overall more clearly in the realist tradition. Ouida was also influenced heavily by French sentimentalism, especially George Sand. Dobson shows that sentimental language is self-effacing, seeking to stay simple and conversational, and may even deliberately use clichés to invoke its affective response.19 Such language seems very far from Ouida’s mode in either the early swashbuckling fiction or the later aesthetic work. However, one sees clearly in Village the use of a simple mode of narration in the sentimental mode and a more erudite, drier style in the satiric voice of the narrator. On the shooting of a pet dog, the language is simple and pathetic: Blood was pouring from its mouth, but it moved its little curly tail feebly in welcome and farewell. Then the little bright eyes glazed and seemed to sink into its head, its heart beat convulsively through a few seconds more, it stretched out its limbs feebly, and then was still forever. … It lay dead in a pool of its own blood. (134)

While lurid, this passage is neither complex nor does it strain for originality of language. Rather, it uses clichés (‘dead in a pool of its own blood’) and simple description, including diminutives (‘little curly tail,’ ‘little bright eyes’) to mobilize emotion.20 The direct address of the narrator, when describing institutional or structural issues, uses more of a sardonic tone and more metaphorical and abstract language: The tramway was not made; the foreign speculators and the home municipalities were quarrelling, and until their quarrels were ended, the work could not be begun. The speculators said the municipalities had cheated, and the municipality gave the speculators a tu-quoque. It was a quarrel like a croupier’s and a gamester’s. Of all these things the population of the commune understood nothing; they were like a horse who has his mane docked and his chin singed; he feels uncomfortable, but does not know what is being done to him. Italy is always being docked and singed; being amiable she does not kick her groom, but she is always smarting, and flies are always raising gall upon her loins. (136)

A comparison to one of the most familiar sentimental moments in Dickens may help us see the continuities in this kind of strategy. A classic instance of sentimental language is used by the narrator who directly addresses the reader in another death scene (and yes, there are several). A representative passage makes use of an apostrophe to end a chapter, familiar from Dickens’ Bleak House21 and used in a similar case. Instead of Jo, who has been ‘moved on’ to the next world, Dobson, ‘Reclaiming Sentimental Literature’, p. 270. It is worth noting that there is also a ‘little’ child with curly hair who is driven

19 20

permanently insane by seeing the shooting of the dog. 21 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), ch. 47.

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her deathbed subject is Nunziatina, a Betty Higden-like peasant woman arrested and imprisoned for begging, a crime she does not even understand. ‘Lord, let me see the sun again; let me see the hills!’ she cried, aloud, stretching out her arms, and in that last prayer she died. Will she see the sun again, free from all cloud, a sun that never sets? Will something greater than ourselves, and more pitiful than the state, let that poor, dumb, tired little soul of hers arise and rejoice in the green hills of an everlasting world? If this be the last of her, this death on a strange bed, in a prison that hypocrisy calls a refuge, then let us weep for her indeed; ignorant, valiant, true, busy and most harmless creature, almost as dumb as the dogs, quite as cheerful as the birds, having borne heat, and cold, and hunger and pain without complaint so long as she was free. ‘Be good to me, O God, for my boat is so small and the deep sea is so wide,’ is the prayer of the Breton fisher. Alas, how many boats go down and where is the pity of God? (323)

The apostrophe begins, apparently, to the reader, and then seems addressed to God – but dramatizes the absence of an answering deity. Like many death scenes in sentimental literature, it invokes a scene of heavenly recompense for suffering – but undercuts it with doubt of such eternal justice. The passage implicitly urges the reader to take the place of an absent deity and an indifferent or actively cruel state. Like Jo from Bleak House or Betty from Our Mutual Friend, Nunziatina is oppressed by an unfair legal system. As in Bleak House, too, we are interpolated as readers with a certain power – the power to oppose this system, for which purpose the lawyerly voice of Dickens appeals to us. The long periodic sentences, with their use of familiar, perhaps clichéd, but simple language, is a stock tactic of sentimentalist tradition (although Ouida is less positive about religious sentiment than earlier sentimental authors). The tropes of separation and affective loss – dying alone, unjustly imprisoned, innocently and dumbly suffering – are meant to heighten emotion based on the core values of sentimentalism. During the sentimental appeal, the narrator tends to use non-ironic and Biblical language, whereas when defining the larger political situation, the tone is both more biting and more urbane, as is Dickens when leading out from Jo’s deathbed scene to the mock-legalistic address to the reader. In this kind of sentimental literature, we have a reversal of the standard arc of both nineteenth-century realism and melodrama. It is the villain who is, in Nancy Armstrong’s terms, the ‘good subject’ and is materially rewarded; the character who has our sympathy and is the morally ‘good subject’ is not rewarded or reclaimed. It is not tragedy, for the victim learns nothing and no community values in the world of the text are affirmed or restored by the sufferings of the protagonists. We don’t expect complexity in a hagiograph, and an angelic character like Stowe’s Uncle Tom22 would lose his force if he exercised agency 22 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, eds Henry Louis Gates and Hollis Robbins (New York: Norton, 2007).

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or showed effective resistance. By realist standards these characters are foolishly complicit in their own victimization. By sentimental standards, they are saintly martyrs; what matters is not the complexity of their interiority, but the intensity of their suffering. Their interiority is exactly correspondent with their surface. This is perhaps what makes animals such congenial heroes for Ouida; animals are by nature melodramatic creatures in the human narrative, and Ouida’s peasants are portrayed as animal-like. This makes these novels particularly difficult to approach seeking feminist (or realist) celebrations of agency, especially among the characters, with whom the realist reader is conventionally supposed to identify. Glenn Hendler points out that when Stowe rhetorically asked after her denunciation of slavery, ‘But, what can any individual do?’, her response was that they could ‘see to it that they feel right.’23 It is in the world outside the text, the world of readers, that learning may take place and that values are being affirmed. The appeal is sentimental in that it demands an affective response; it then directs that response with a political critique. In A Village Commune, then, Ouida mobilizes two modes of narrative: a sentimental mode devoid of irony to portray the destruction of familial and communal bonds caused by Italian administrative politics and a satiric voice, that of a directive and intrusive narrator, addressing political issues. When authors such as Fanny Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Dickens used sentimentalism to a specific purpose – decrying the evils of child factory labour, the conflict of masters and unionized labour or the general evils of bureaucracy, they were careful to direct the aroused indignation of the reader. Barbara Benedict has identified a spectatorial tendency in sentimentalism’s management of sympathy, a tendency to structure the narrative in such a way that the reader is moved but not overwhelmed by feeling.24 Some authors use a narrator moved by the emotion suffered by the characters but not mastered by it, able to mediate it rationally to the reader. The traditional feminine narrative voice had been non-ironic, and more closely aligned to the sentimental one, though also more detached. Dickens, however, adopted a more traditionally masculine satiric voice as a counterpoint to his scenes of sentiment. It is this dual mode that Ouida adopts as well. Whereas Gaskell disavows any knowledge of political economy and calls upon her authority as an eyewitness of suffering and a Christian woman in earnest tones, Dickens rails against the Court of Chancery with sarcasm. Ouida uses a very earnest and specifically political critique of both the theory and practice of Italian government in her Appendix to the volume. She denounces the abuses of government as likely to lead to anarchy, and reaches a Herbert Spencer-like assessment of the freedom promoted by the model of communal government: What I despise in the pseudo-liberalism of the age is that it has become only the tyranny of narrow minds vested under high-sounding phrases. I would give

Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments, p. 3. Barbara Benedict, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction,

23 24

1745–1800 (New York: AMS Press, 1994), pp. 9–12.

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Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture / Gilbert alike to a Capucin as to a communist the free choice of his opinions and mode of life. … Yet this pseudo-liberty meddles with every phase of private life, and would dictate the rule of every simple act. Every noble hearted theorist of a future of freedom has died in heartbroken disillusion. (215)

Sentimentalism has been trenchantly critiqued, not only in its own time but ours, for substituting the display of affect for political action – Anne Cvetkovich has spoken to this problem eloquently.25 Or worse, it has been charged with raising emotion that then might be channeled in distinctly counterproductive directions. Responsible sentimentalism, however, invites the reader to sympathize with and experience the suffering it depicts, but also to reflect and learn from the meaning of that suffering in a way rarely immediately available to the characters. Sometimes, especially in more realist narratives, this dual vision comes from the same character – the adult Jane Eyre narrating her childhood traumas with some distance. At other times, it comes from an omniscient narrator who may step in at the times of most heightened emotion and comment, leading the reader temporarily outside the diegetic frame. The function of this alternating mode of narration within the novel – earnest sentimentalism focused on the intimate sphere of the suffering of families, and sardonic commentary on the public domain of institutional structures, allows for the double gaze of sympathy gestured toward by both Hendler and Benedict. One the one hand, we are moved to tears by the suffering of the characters and on the other distanced by their ‘inferiority’ (of class or species) and by the directive voice of the narrator, whose vision is less limited and more able to take in the entire social structure. This distance allows us to understand the significance of our emotion and channel it correctly. If the miserable Viola sees a particular villain and tyrant in her village syndic, Signore Nellamane, whose power looms to her so large, we see a minor functionary in a structure which creates and rewards such behaviour. Sentimentalism often uses not only clichés, but lyricism and poetic style to heighten emotion. One need only think of the death of Dickens’ Little Nell to see the significance of repetition, exaggeration, and lyrical rhythm to this style. It is a style largely lost on later readers – hence, Oscar Wilde’s famous pronouncement that, ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.’26 But it was a style particularly suited to the aims of sentimentalism. The point was not to surprise, intellectually engage or educate in the first instance, but to move by appealing to familiar emotions and structures of feeling. Sentimentalism does not seek novelty but the well-recognized, valuing language that is simultaneously lyrical and familiar, in rhetorical structures that emphasize repetition and recursiveness. By recursiveness, I mean a rhetoric that not only repeats, but refers backward, that moves simultaneously forward to an end and back to reactivate 25 Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979). 26 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 441. Ellmann identifies Ada Leverson as the source of this quotation, supposedly made to her by Wilde.

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earlier structures in the text, so that an event is always connected rhetorically, if not logically, to earlier ones. So – what if we read Ouida’s prose as lyric – with an associative logic and a structure based on repetition and the accumulation of imagery as much as on forward narrative motion? At least some of her readers read her in exactly this way, seeking a voluptuous pleasure in her Homeric catalogues of commodities, and descriptions of their colours, scents and textures. We are largely familiar with Ouida’s breathless lyricism in describing the commodities associated with the novel of high life (think Beauty Cecil’s drawing room Under Two Flags) or the allure of the exotic (think the first North Africa chapter in the same novel).27 In the novels we are concerned with here, it was her long passages on setting and landscape that were repeatedly praised, and especially in the case of the Italian novels, which were less plot driven than the novels of high life, praised by Victorian critics and authors considered discerning. Ruskin praised A Village Commune’s realistic portrayal of Italian peasant life. Here is an Italian pastoral, one of many such examples: Here where the ancient walls of its citadel rise hoary and broken against the blueness of the sky; there where the arches of the bridges span the river, and the sand and the shallows and the straw that is drying in summer shine together yellow in the sun; here where under the sombre pointed archways the little children play, their faces like the cherubs and the cupids of the renaissance; there where the cobblers and coopers and the plaiting maidens and the makers of the yellow rush brooms, all work away under lintels, and corbels, and carved beam timbers, four hundred years old if one; here where through the gateways with their portcullises woven over by the spiders, there only pass the patient mules with sacks of flour, or the hay carts dropping grasses, or the waggons of new wine; there where the villas that were all fortresses in the fierce fighting times of old, gleam white in the light upon their crests of hills with their cypresses like sentinels around them, and breadths of corn and vineyards traversed by green grassy paths, that lead upward to where the stone pine and the myrtle make sweet the air together.28

This long series of repeating oppositions (‘Here…there…’) highlight the yoked oppositions between ancient walled town and fields that make up Signa as an agricultural market district with a long and largely unregarded history, its combination of great age and its inhabitants’ unconscious immersion in the present day. The tempo is unhurried and the sentences tend to fall in emphasis as they wind toward completion, ending on nouns and adjective clauses rather than verbs, emphasizing calm rather than excitement. Clauses that seem to be tending toward terminating a thought will pause and then begin afresh to accumulate another example. Assonance and alliteration are used to great effect internally within each clause and often are ‘sprung’ to create multiple combinations that lead the 27 Ouida, Under Two Flags (London: Chapman & Hall, 1867), 1 pp. 2–3, ch. 13 “In the Café of the Chasseurs” esp. pp. 296–9. 28 Ouida, Signa (London: Chapman & Hall, 1875), 1, pp. 5–6.

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reader reflexively back along the line. For example, ‘cobblers and coopers and the plaiting maidens and the makers…’ initially creates a combination of hard c and then distributes the p in coopers and plaiting, followed by the m in maidens and makers. Initially, then, we tend to pair two terms, only to discover an alternate pairing by adding the third term and then a new pairing between the third and fourth, etc. It is likely this kind of complex, even precious lyricism that so delighted authors as diverse as Bulwer Lytton, Ruskin, Chesterton, and Vernon Lee, and lead them to declare the descriptions of landscape in her later novels the finest feature of her work.29 The style works to reinforce the movement of sentiment in the novel, emphasizing alternately the long view of the detached narrator – the great age of the culture and comparative insignificance of the story of one artistically gifted peasant – and the emotionally resonant sentimentalism of descriptions of poverty and suffering. This passage is a British postcard of an Italian village – it emphasizes what the British valued in Italy at the time: pre- or antimodernity, picturesqueness, and animal vitality. The threat in A Village Commune is precisely to that idealized vision of a pastoral premodern Italy, as the evil Nellamane keeps building factories and industrializing mills. And so the rhythm of the prose and the quality of the language differs substantially from the pell-mell cataloguing of commodities she associates with modern wealth and connoisseurship in the London or Parisian settings. I have tried to give just a few examples from these lesser-read works of what readers may have valued that we may tend to overlook, as we read them both against a larger tradition of realism and against the specific oeuvre of Ouida’s work that we have already recuperated. But what does this do for us? How does this work against the existing models of filiation that I have discussed earlier as ‘enabling traps’ for the scholar? Am I not simply making the same gesture with a different genre? Yes and no. Having decided to approach Ouida afresh after some years ‘away’ from her work, I set myself the task of reading the novels that don’t get attention because ‘no one’ likes them. With unscientific egotism, I decided that the novels I didn’t particularly like were the ones no one else does, and to some extent that has been confirmed by the lack of any critical work on them. I did this not merely as an ascetic exercise or act of contrition, but because I wished to try to understand their appeal. To some extent the appeal of Under Two Flags or Moths30 is still available to us as twenty-first-century readers, but the appeal of A Village Commune seems less so. I wanted to see what these texts would tell us about what readers valued, and I wanted to reflect on what our blindness to or lack of Here, however, the sentimentalism is not deployed to a political end. The villain of this particular novel – a melodramatic one – is a greedy and beautiful woman who destroys the protagonist apparently just for fun. She is then stabbed to death by Signa’s adoptive father, so the ‘tragic’ ending does provide some catharsis. But it just as frequently does not, as in Folle Farine. See Lee, Ouida: A Memoir (London: T.F. Unwin, 1914), p. 241 and passim. 30 Ouida, Moths, ed. Natalie Schroeder (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005). 29

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interest in those values would tell us about our professional assumptions. What I find is that despite our best efforts, we still see non-realist genres as failed realism. We also still fundamentally believe in the romance of resistance, and we tend to find that resistance in character complexity and narratives of vexed interiority. I have read these novels into an alternate filiation not to justify attention to them as leading to (or from) valuable works – Look, they aren’t failed realism but good sentimentalism! – but in order to think through some larger assumptions about the filiations we tend to privilege. While I don’t think that sentimentalism is more politically interesting than realism or melodrama, it is different in its structure and operation, and requires a reading which does not narrowly focus on the success or failure of characters as ‘people’ whose class or gender position is something they are struggling to reconcile; this is the typical narrative that Nancy Armstrong sees as fundamental to the story of the Individual that is the gold standard of nineteenth-century realism. In some way the sentimental narrative should be ideal for critics, as the real struggle to decide meaning and apply it to a larger social context is left right from the beginning firmly in the hands of readers, rather than characters who, after all, are often ill-equipped to bear such a burden.

Fig. 3.1

Under Two Flags, cover, Chatto & Windus 6th edition, 1898

Chapter 3

‘Between Men’: Romantic Friendship in Ouida’s Early Novels Jane Jordan

To analyze Ouida’s early novels is to face a conundrum: why would a Victorian woman writer choose to masquerade as a male author and write novels for an exclusively male readership (‘mes frères’) narratives that predominantly chart romantic friendships between men? Why choose to detail exclusively male spheres of life – the race-course, the smoking-room, club land, barrack life and military action – spheres of which she could have no personal knowledge? While it is true that Ouida cultivated the acquaintance of male society, in particular military men, following her move to a suite of rooms at the Langham Hotel in 1867, the fourth of her male romances, Under Two Flags, was by then already mid-serialization. The chronology gives a lie to the myth propounded by her first publisher, William Tinsley, and taken as fact by her biographers, that Ouida furnished her early fiction with military anecdotes supplied by her male dinner guests whom she encouraged to talk freely: ‘Now, gentlemen, suppose my mother and I are out of the room. Smoke and drink as if you were at the club; talk as if you were in the smoking-room there; never think about us’.1 Florence Marryat, who met Ouida at Chapman & Hall’s offices, but was plainly not invited to these parties at the Langham, heard that Ouida ‘never allowed anybody to visit her at her house [sic], except men’.2 At the start of her career, Ouida’s knowledge of men was textual in origin. As critics pointed out, Ouida’s early fiction owed a great deal to the novels of her contemporary, George Alfred Lawrence, and to Edward Bulwer Lytton, a silver fork novelist of the previous generation. One could argue, as it was argued at the time, that as a young novelist emerging on the literary scene, 1 William Tinsley, Random Recollections, 2 vols (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, 1900), I, p. 85. See, for example, Elizabeth Lee, Ouida: A Memoir (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1914), pp. 43–4. 2 ‘Interview with Miss Florence Marryat’, Pall Mall Gazette, 16 May 1883, p. 11. Likewise, Lippincott’s Magazine (Lippincott was Ouida’s American publisher) reported that ‘ladies are never admitted to her weekly receptions’, cited in Bury and Norwich Post, 9 August 1870, p. 5. One of the only ladies to be admitted was Isabel Burton, wife of the explorer Richard Burton, of whom Ouida was a great admirer.

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Ouida was ‘anxious only to hit a popular taste which had been educated on Guy Livingstone’ (Lawrence’s novel of 1857).3 Indeed, she secured a contract for her first novel, Held in Bondage (1863), with Lawrence’s publishers, the Tinsleys. Ouida clearly admired Lawrence: he was a regular guest at the Langham, and when she read of Lawrence’s death in 1876 she immediately wrote to Frederick Chapman for information.4 Yet her correspondence with Lytton suggests a more lofty aspiration than hitting the popular market. In September 1871 she wrote to Lytton en route for Italy: ‘it always seems to me that the artist has one duty that he [sic] must place before all i.e. to seek earnestly for the truth’,5 an avowal which accords with similar statements made to her publisher, Andrew Chatto. Distancing herself from Chatto’s stable of popular novelists, Ouida reminded him that she didn’t ‘regard Art merely as a means of making money’; ‘with me you may be sure that the artistic feeling always overweighs all other’.6 Ouida’s novels of the 1860s do not merely imitate established male writers, but re-write the male romance in order to examine the function of the romantic heroine within the homosocial power structure and to analyze erotic borderlines of homosocial desire; women are positioned in the text solely in relation to the bond between male friends. Carolyn Oulton’s major study of romantic friendship between men in the nineteenth century, which extends the parameters of Sedgwick’s analysis of homosocial desire, offers a new perspective from which to assess Ouida’s pairing of gentlemanly comrades.7 Oulton examines the cultivation of romantic friendship in Britain’s public schools at mid-century which gave rise to the promotion of muscular Christianity as a reaction against Classical, specifically Greek, models of male friendship which were at the heart of the curriculum. The exclusively male world of the Greeks was highly toxic given particular sexual practices, and Greek models of male friendship would of course be appropriated towards the end of the century by liberal apologists for homosexual love (such as Wilde and Symonds) who deliberately conflated male friendship with male– male love (pp. 40–41).8 Oulton offers a useful corrective to scholars studying 3 Daily Telegraph, 27 January 1908, p. 7. For an extended discussion of Ouida’s re-working of Guy Livingstone, see Jane Jordan, ‘Ouida’, in A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 220–31, pp. 224–5. 4 Ouida to Frederick Chapman, 5 October 1876, Wolff Uncat., University of Texas, Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre. Hereafter, UTA. 5 Ouida to Edward Bulwer Lytton, 19 September 1871, Lytton Papers, D/EK C12, Hertfordshire County Record Office. The two first met at the Langham in June 1871. 6 Ouida to Chatto & Windus, 15 April 1883 and 2 September 1880, New York Public Library, Berg Collection. 7 Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton, Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007). All subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. 8 See, for example, Linda Dowling on the significance of Wilde’s speeches at his criminal trials, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1997), pp. 2–4.

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romantic friendship between men at mid-century, however, and cautions the modern reader against taking evocations of ancient models of male friendship as coded references to homosexual relationships involving proscribed sexual acts between men (p. 38) – an interpretation that seemed so tempting at the height of our practice of queering literary texts in the 1990s. Rather it is Oulton’s thesis that David and Jonathan (models of heroic altruism) were employed in order to police the terms of romantic (idealized or ‘enthusiastic’) friendship within the ‘carefully regulated context’ of muscular Christianity (rather than effeminacy) and manly purity (rather than sexual depravity) (p. 42). However, as Oulton is the first to acknowledge, the Christian model was not without its dangers because of the inherent tension between the connubial ideal and the ideal of friendship between two people of the same sex (p. 43), a tension resolved through the ‘familiar pattern’ (p. 34) of eventual marriage to the best friend’s sister or cousin (or daughter, in Ouida). Running counter to this consoling resolution, in which the heroes’ romantic friendship is sustained, cemented even, by marriage, is the textual disruption caused by the dramatic requirement for one friend to disappear or die and the wild expressions of love uttered by the bereaved. While it is the case that Ouida’s early novels consistently test the culturally legitimate boundaries of romantic friendship, one of the most interesting features of three of these novels from the mid-1860s, Strathmore, Chandos and Under Two Flags, is the persecution of the beautiful and effeminate hero by a manly man who, repelled by these qualities, either sadistically punishes him, or kills him. Ouida poses the question put by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick more than 130 years later: ‘Is men’s desire for other men the great preservative of the masculinist hierarchies of Western culture, or is it among the most potent threats against them?’9 Passing as a Male Author A regular contributor to Bentley’s Miscellany and the New Monthly Magazine, in 1864, Ouida was signed up by James Frith as a member of the regular staff on his fledgling monthly periodical, the British Army and Navy Review. She remained its sole female contributor (a fact not disclosed to readers). Ouida was also the magazine’s chief fiction writer, bar one or two anonymous short stories, one of which, by the young Arthur à Beckett, Ouida was asked to touch up before it was published.10 The serialization of Ouida’s Under Two Flags was Frith’s only experimentation with longer fiction, and, according to the London Review, Ouida’s novel was one of the magazine’s only recommendations to non9 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990) (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 93. 10 À Beckett later acknowledged Ouida’s assistance (that is, after her death) in the Westminster Gazette, 27 January 1908, p. 5.

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professional readers.11 The deception practised upon readers of the British Army and Navy Review might seem audacious, knowing as we do the way in which literary production was unequivocally gendered, yet Frith relied upon the fact that Ouida’s male identity had been firmly established in Bentley’s Miscellany (dating back to 1859), and, too, in the minds of reviewers of her first novels, who took it as read that Ouida was a gentleman who had seen military action. At the beginning of her association with the British Army and Navy Review that identity seemed watertight. The Morning Post, for one, observed that the views expressed in Ouida’s essay ‘A Word on the practice of Duelling. Apropos de Brantôme’ (views devoid of ‘morals or anything like religious feeling’) were exactly what one might expect ‘from the author of “Granville de Vigne”’ (Ouida’s first novel, subsequently re-issued as Held in Bondage).12 The Morning Chronicle and the Standard, in particular, were responsible for cultivating the identity of the pseudonymous contributor to Bentley’s Miscellany. The Standard noticed Ouida’s absence from the May 1862 edition of Bentley’s, asking, ‘What has become of him? Has he got a notion that it is plebeian to write, or is he only taking a rest from his arduous labours as the chronicler of mythical swelldom?’.13 A year earlier, the Morning Chronicle detected a new purpose to ‘his’ writing, which was apparently to be accounted for by ‘the new vigour displayed by his fellow labourers in the periodical’ rubbing off on Ouida.14 This conception of Ouida as a gentlemanly littérateur, writing ‘brilliant nothings’ on a whim,15 yet displaying periodic signs of literary ambition, underwent significant transformation when she came to write for the British Army and Navy Review. Besides her fictional output (four short stories and the serialisation of Under Two Flags), Ouida was commissioned to write four articles – her first venture in non-fiction writing: the article on duelling already referred to, ‘Dumouriez – As a Soldier of the Revolution, Guilty or not Guilty?’ (December 1864, and February to March 1865), ‘Stray Thoughts on Some Military Ribbons’ (April 1865), and ‘Sulla Felix. A Word on the Victor of the Esquiline Hill’ (June 1865), all of which strengthened her assumed identity as a gentlemanly scholar and as a man of military experience. It was Geraldine Jewsbury who first sniffed out the fact that Ouida was a woman writer, in her review of Strathmore (Ouida’s second novel) for the Athenaeum in July 1865.16 Interestingly, this was some months before Bentley 13 14 15 16

London Review, 11 279 (4 November 1865), p. 497. Morning Post, 8 May 1865, p. 2. Standard, 8 May 1862, p. 6. Morning Chronicle, 4 February 1861, p. 6. Morning Post, 4 February 1862, p. 3. Athenaeum, 29 July 1865, p. 142. According to Nicola Thompson, there is evidence to suggest that female reviewers of the period were ‘often harsher on women novelists who deviate from gender stereotypes than are many of the male reviewers’, in order to ‘consolidate their [own] precarious hold on literary authority and respectability’, 11

12

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(for whom she was a reader) asked for Jewsbury’s literary judgement on the manuscript of Under Two Flags (her reader’s report is dated December 1865). Bentley was about to buy the British Army and Navy Review and would have been well aware of Ouida’s real identity through her long association with the Miscellany. Other reviewers followed more cautiously; they had their suspicions, yet no one actually seemed to know who Ouida was. Thus, in its late review of Strathmore the following spring, the Pall Mall Gazette hedged: ‘this book is a female book’, whilst admitting, ‘we have no idea whether “Strathmore” is written by a man or a woman’.17 In the autumn of 1866, the Westminster Review, perplexed by Ouida’s choice of pseudonym, noted, ‘we have been assured, on excellent authority, that “Ouida” is a woman. People even go so far as to say that they know her. We don’t believe them’.18 Yet it was the case that a significant number of publishers and magazine editors did know Ouida; the wonder is that she managed to keep her identity a secret for so long. In spite of the growing speculation as to her sex, some reviewers persisted in believing that she was a male author – so persuaded were they by the strength of the persona she had cultivated. The Reader and London Review were both convinced that her next novel, Chandos, was by a man.19 As late as September 1867, Margaret Oliphant was still in doubt, saying only that Ouida was ‘to be supposed a woman’.20 It wasn’t until 1876 that Ouida revealed to the public that her pseudonym originated in her childish approximation of Louise or Louisa in a profile commissioned by Edmund Yates for his ‘Celebrities at Home’ series in The World. Yet the innocent explanation offered to her readers was disingenuous and avoids entirely the question of why Ouida chose a deliberately ambivalent nom de plume (ambivalent in terms of national as well as gendered identity) behind which to write as a man.21 Critical doubt over Ouida’s identity was entirely understandable, given not simply her adoption of a gentlemanly persona and the exclusively male worlds of her early fiction, but her literary style – the tell-tale ‘vigour’ of her writing – was a quality often noted. Thus, the Westminster Review on the ‘masterly’ Idalia, in which novel Ouida ‘never shows a woman’s hand’, and the Standard Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 11, p. 12. 17 Rev. of Strathmore, Pall Mall Gazette, 4 May 1866, p. 12. 18 Rev. of Chandos, Westminster Review, 30 (October 1866), 524–6, p. 525. 19 Reviews of Chandos in Reader, 12 May 1866, p. 465, and London Review, 23 June 1866, p. 707. 20 Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 102 (September 1867), 257–80, p. 269. 21 See Andrew King, ‘Crafting the Woman Artist: Ouida and Ariadnê’, in Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, eds Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), esp. pp. 209–11. for an insightful discussion of the implications of Ouida’s pseudonym within the context of her later Italian romances.

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on Under Two Flags, in which there is ‘[no] trace of a womanly hand’.22 The fact that Ouida’s masculine style was derivative (‘she is by nature an imitative being’)23 had been consistently noted by reviewers, and Ouida was advised to try something more original, but critical opinion changed entirely when her sex was discovered.24 As Hamilton Hume, himself a former writer for the British Army and Navy Review, and now editor of the comic paper, Will-o-the-Wisp, remarked: The mystery that so long overhung the name of Ouida having been cleared up, some few of the critics, in all their glory of war paint and feathers, have been dancing and shouting over the discovery. That a woman should write with such vigorous power, and display such a keen knowledge of human nature, and soar above the namby-pamby twaddle of the day, is to them perfectly outrageous.25

The Saturday Review’s critique of Under Two Flags provides an excellent example of the misogyny of the press detailed by Nicola Thompson.26 So persuaded was this reviewer by the authenticity of the novel’s Algerian setting to suggest that Ouida was not merely ‘well crammed’ but must also be writing from ‘recent personal observations’ (since her intimate knowledge of the Chasseurs d’Afrique ‘bear intrinsic evidence of being founded on studies from the life’), he nonetheless felt duty-bound to remind readers that when ‘described by a lady the result is at once offensive and incredible’.27 Likewise, Jewsbury in the Athenaeum warned Ouida against making the ‘not uncommon female mistake, in fancying she is daring in thought when she is only indecorous of speech’.28 For the literary establishment, one of the most disturbing aspects of Ouida’s early novels was their general air of effeminacy. Reviewers tended to voice their objections within the context of Ouida’s wider ignorance (as a woman writer) of the ways of aristocratic society. ‘Who told her’, asked the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘that men smoke perfumed cigars?’29 In its characteristically satirical review of Under Two Flags, the Pall Mall – having drawn attention to the fact that 22 Anon., ‘Ouida’s Novels’, Westminster Review, 49 (April 1876), 360–86, p. 383; rev. of Under Two Flags, Standard, 10 February 1868, p. 6. 23 Rev. of Strathmore, Pall Mall Gazette, 4 May 1865, p. 12. 24 See Jordan, ‘Ouida’, p. 224, for a discussion of the way in which the Westminster Review treated Ouida once her identity had been revealed. 25 Hamilton Hume, ‘Literature’, Will-o-the-Wisp, 1, 23 February 1867, p. 7. Hume was a close friend of Ouida’s and it was he who gave her the dog, Sulla, in 1866. 26 See Nicola Thompson, Reviewing Sex. 27 Rev. of Under Two Flags, Saturday Review, 25 January 1868, pp. 120–21. 28 Rev. of Strathmore, Athenaeum, 29 July 1865, p. 142. 29 Rev. of Puck, Pall Mall Gazette, 6 January 1870, p. 8. The criticism was unfair: Ouida evidently picked up such details from her reading of Bulwer Lytton. The eponymous hero of Ernest Maltravers (1837) smokes scented tobacco, drinks chocolate for breakfast, and never sits in an armchair when he can relax in a fauteuil.

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Bertie Cecil commonly addresses his friend Seraph as ‘très cher’ – said that it did not ‘doubt that these brave men, in their moments of relaxation, call each other “love” and “darling”, as has been the fashion of schoolgirls in all time’.30 It was an objection that continued to rankle beyond the 1860s, in fact years after Ouida had abandoned the male romances of her early career. In 1881, an anonymous officer offered to write the prosaic truth about ‘the life of officers off duty’ – a truth very different from that found in ‘ladies’ novels’ – and prefaces his article by protesting, of Ouida’s heroes, ‘I must say I never heard Englishmen of any class addressing each other as mon cher or très cher’.31 One of the chief targets of Francis Burnand’s Punch burlesque of Ouida’s novels (serialized 9 March–11 May 1878) is precisely Cecil’s effeminacy, even though Burnand is often hard-pushed to satirize Ouida (all the ‘très cher’s stay as they are). He improves upon Cecil’s soubriquet (‘Beauty’ becomes ‘Sweetie’), and his conflation of Under Two Flags with Ouida’s 1865 novel, Strathmore is inspired: Strathmore metamorphoses into ‘Strapmore’, so-called because he holds in his Titan physique with a corset and has to loosen a buckle every time he gets overexcited.32 Reading contemporary responses such as these makes one wonder what on earth readers of the British Army and Navy Review made of Ouida’s peculiar conceptions of masculinity. While it may remain an unanswerable question, what is clear is that Under Two Flags extends the work of Ouida’s preceding novels, Strathmore and Chandos, in presenting the romantic friendship between men as a dangerous secret to be suppressed; furthermore, all three texts position the male reader, who alone is privy to the secret, as the keeper of knowledge about the truth of male-male love. Strathmore (1865) The text of Strathmore is permeated with biblical and classical allusions to the romantic friendship between men: David and Jonathan are evoked, as are Damon and Pythias, and Orestes and Iolaus. Such models are justified given Bertie Erroll’s altruistic act during a youthful adventure in the Scinde, saving Strathmore from a tigress – an episode Erroll makes light of, saying, ‘You would have done the same for me, my dear old fellow’.33 The two men, friends since Eton days, regard themselves as ‘brothers’, and refer to their brotherly bond as ‘love’. So far, so straightforward, yet in order to sustain their romantic friendship their relations with women are nothing if not complex. An ‘icicle’ (p. 87) where women are concerned, Strathmore’s heart has hitherto been Rev. of Under Two Flags, Pall Mall Gazette, 26 December 1867, p. 11. ‘Officers’ Idle Hours. By One of Them’, Time, 5 (April 1881), 117–19, p. 117. 32 Francis Burand, ‘Strapmore! A Romance by Weeder’: see ch. 6, 30 March 1878, 30 31

pp. 141–3. 33 Ouida, Strathmore; or, Wrought by his own Hand (1865) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1893), p. 18. All subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.

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impregnable to the fairer sex: he has casual lovers, but professes to merely ‘brush the bloom, and taste the sweetness!’ (p. 8); and he complains bitterly about Erroll’s pursuit of women: ‘this wasting of hours, this ceaseless adoration of women … was incomprehensible and somewhat contemptible in his sight’ (p. 20). In fact, Erroll has a wife and child secreted in a cottage in the grounds of Strathmore’s estate: he cannot make public his marriage to Lucille De Vocqsal, the destitute orphaned daughter of a Hungarian refugee, for fear that his uncle will disinherit him. Not even Strathmore knows of her existence. Known as the Beau Sabreur on account of his ‘magnificent muscle and reckless brilliance’ (p. 5), but also his striking beauty, Erroll’s face is ‘almost as attractive to men as to women’: possessing ‘frank, clear, azure eyes’, his ‘long fair hair sweeping off a forehead white as the most delicate blonde’s’ (p. 6). Given this strange setup, it is of little surprise that Strathmore is brought down by a siren who closely resembles Erroll. Marion Vavasour is another stunning blonde. She may not have Erroll’s azure eyes, but she blinds Strathmore with azure draperies: framed by azure curtains (p. 94), she wears an azure negligee (p. 73), azure skirts (p. 159) and ribbons (p. 118); even her veins are azure (p. 75); we see her on the morning after they first make love, enveloped by ‘folds of azure’ (p. 168), as Strathmore ‘stooped over her, spending breathless kisses on her lips, and passing his hands through the golden scented hair which floated on her shoulders’ (p. 169). So complete is her seduction of Strathmore that he turns down the honour of a diplomatic assignment with the Foreign Office in order to be with her, upon which Erroll protests and attempts to warn Strathmore of his folly (in order to convince Strathmore of Marion’s baseness he reveals that she has attempted to make love to him, also). Erroll then compounds his crime through his passionate articulation of their romantic friendship: We have lived, and shared, and thought together, as though the same mother had borne us. We have not prated about it like boys, but we have held each other closer than men of the same blood do. We never had an evil word between us till she wrought them. Strathmore! is all that to be swept away in a single night? (p. 202)

To which Strathmore replies that Erroll is being ‘admirably theatrical! … I should prefer that we used the language of gentlemen’ (p. 203). Using the language of gentlemen, Strathmore challenges Erroll to a duel in France. Whereas in Lawrence’s Guy Livingstone, Guy’s grief for his friend Charley Forrester is uncomplicated (Charley is murdered by his lover’s fiancé – in other words, the romantic friendship between Guy and Charley is severed by a third party), Ouida has Strathmore himself take the life of Erroll in order to deny Erroll’s romantic claim on him. Erroll shoots in the air, but Strathmore’s aim is sure and deadly, straight through Erroll’s heart – Erroll’s death-throes configured as an orgasmic consummation of their love: ‘without sign or sound he fell down upon the sodden turf ... his hands drawing up the rank herbage by the roots, as

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they closed convulsively in one brief spasm’ (p. 225). Unmoved, Strathmore’s final act is to cut off a lock of Erroll’s soiled hair which he presents as a trophy to his mistress. That is not all. Erroll has left a letter for Strathmore, fully forgiving him, setting the record straight about Marion’s attempts at seduction, and begging him to protect his wife and child. It is only now that his friend is dead that Strathmore is free to express his love for Erroll: in a theatrical demonstration he utters a ‘cry of great agony – and throwing his arms above his head, he fell like a drunken man, down upon the sodden earth’ (p. 233). In the next chapter he challenges Marion with the truth, almost throttling her; significantly, Strathmore’s appearance is detailed using the same highly sexualized imagery employed to describe Erroll’s corpse: ‘his hair wet and clotted with the damp sweat of anguish; his dress disordered, and stained with the soil of the earth, and the dews of the morning’ (p. 234). Keeping vigil over the unburied dead, Strathmore at last realizes what he has done: This man had loved him, had suffered for him, had borne with sacrifice and wrong for his sake, had cleaved to him closer than a brother … the iron of [Strathmore’s] nature broken asunder, yielded and gave way, and one deep, gasping sob quivered in the air as he sank forward, calling in his blind agony on the name of the dead. (pp. 240–41)

When, years later, Strathmore determines to marry Erroll’s 16-year-old daughter, also Lucille, whom he has made his ward (Erroll’s wife conveniently dies of shock when she is told of Erroll’s murder), the text is quite explicit in presenting Lucille as a mere cipher, a socially acceptable substitute for the love between her father and Strathmore – in marrying Lucille, Strathmore is marrying his dead ‘brother’. According to Oulton’s reading of literary constructions of romantic friendship, the death of one man permits, legitimizes even, his friend’s passionate expression of grief – expression that would be proscribed were both living. Yet Ouida raises the tension by the fact that Strathmore’s hand in Erroll’s death has to be kept a secret from his daughter, and the social order. Strathmore’s articulation of his love for Erroll must therefore remain an essentially private act, and the textual space afforded his grief, grief for the man who was ‘closer than a brother’, becomes itself an illicit secret shared only with the reader. As a child, Lucille resembles her father so closely that, He saw him, a young child, even as this, with the same fair, trailing hair and the same smile like sunshine on his lips; … he felt the touch of his young hand; he lived again in those years that had long drifted by ... And a bitter cry broke from him where he stood on the solitary shore: “My brother! My brother”. (pp. 265–6)

On the eve of his marriage, Strathmore keeps watch by Erroll’s tomb, the man ‘whom he had loved as David loved the son of Saul’ (p. 513): ‘In his throat

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rose one deep, tearless sob that broke the silence of the night. Not for himself― never for himself―but for the dead whom he loved, and the guiltless life that he guarded’ (p. 514). When Lucille stands before Strathmore to exchange her wedding vows, ‘it was not Lucille whom he saw, it was the friend whom he had loved and slain’ (p. 518). Chandos (1866) Ouida’s next novel, Chandos, is a tribute to Bulwer Lytton whom she regarded as a ‘supreme artist’.34 Ernest Chandos is modelled on Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers (1837), another gentlemanly author-hero; Chandos’s hit novel of the season, Lucrèce, clearly alludes to Lytton’s novel Lucretia (1846). Throughout the 1860s, Ouida was frequently accused of writing in imitation of male authors like Lytton, but she would appear to have taken Ernest Maltravers’ edict to heart: that writers who obtain immortality ‘must be connected with the history of their literature ... in a word they must form a link in the great chain of a nation’s authors’.35 The two Ernests fall in love with a blonde child the reader fears is their natural daughter. Neither finds a satisfactory woman to love – indeed, both spend much of their respective novels not loving women who love them; Chandos’ child-bride is revealed to be the daughter of his best friend, Phillipe d’Orval who dies after having bought back Chandos’s estate Clarencieux. Where Ouida departs from Lytton is in the narrative structure provided by Ernest Chandos’ illegitimate half-brother’s revenge upon the injustice suffered by his mother: a thrusting middle-class entrepreneur (‘the man for the present’),36 as Chandos’ homme d’affaires, John Trevenna very nearly succeeds in robbing his master of his birthright, rendering him bankrupt. Not until the very end of the novel does Trevenna reveal to Chandos that they are brothers; the whole drive of the narrative hangs upon the fact of their secret relationship, once again a secret known only to the reader. Trevenna’s hatred of Chandos goes far beyond sibling rivalry, however, his chief motivation being what we would now have no hesitation in identifying as homophobia. Trevenna is himself impervious to women (‘he never sought women, – not a whit ... no glance of lustrous eyes ever had power to quicken his pulse one beat’) (p. 285), yet he is disgusted by Chandos (the man he has chosen to shadow) for his ‘womanish beauty’ (435) and ‘effeminate softness’ (p. 149). Both are attracted to the company of young men, but whereas Chandos likes to rescue interesting youths who find themselves in trouble of one kind or another (Trevenna was one such), Trevenna seeks out vulnerable young men in order to Ouida to Edward Bulwer Lytton, 19 September 1871. Edward Bulwer Lytton, Ernest Maltravers (1837) (London & New York: Frederick

34 35

Warne & Co, 1902), p. 127. 36 Ouida, Chandos (1866) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1887), p. 241. All subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.

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play them. His sideline is a money-lending business, Tindall & Co, fronted by an elderly Jew, Ignatius Matthias (a borrowing from Our Mutual Friend), and his business is extortion. Trevenna’s chief victim is Matthias’ own son, the painter Agostino – another effeminate beauty. In one extraordinary scene of threatened sexual violence Trevenna defaces a painting of Agostino’s wife posed as a semiclad Dryad: Trevenna strikes the mahl stick through the still-wet paint, ‘making a blurred, blotted, beaten mass where the thing of beauty had glowed on the canvas’; laughing, he proceeds to stub out his cigar on the canvas: ‘What’s to prevent my slashing that picture across, right and left, with my pen-knife, if I like?’ (pp. 346–7). Yet the episode is topped and tailed by Trevenna’s clear denials that Agostino’s model has any interest for him (‘that isn’t my line’, p. 351): before he vandalizes the portrait, Trevenna admits that Agostino’s delectable model will appeal to ‘men who understand that style of thing; myself, I’m a better judge of bouillabaisse than of a mistress’ (p. 345). When his trashing of the picture is complete, he assures Agostino: ‘I’ve coveted a good many things in my day, but I never coveted a woman’ (p. 351). When Trevenna’s ruination of Chandos is complete and the contents of Clarencieux about to be auctioned, Chandos flees to Paris where Trevenna tracks him down one winter’s night. Consumed by fever, Chandos lies dead to the world, semi-naked in a back-street hovel. When he cries out for water, Trevenna pushes aside the glass left by the landlady and touches his lips with bitter absinthe; he then lays his hand upon Chandos’ bare chest to feel his agonized gasps. For a moment he considers stabbing Chandos, but he gains far more pleasure from looking on at his suffering. In order to neutralize the homoerotic nature of the scene, Trevenna conceives of the prostrate Chandos as a fallen gladiator, yet the implications of imagining their close physical combat, and, too, the clear echoes of Trevenna’s earlier destruction of Agostino’s painting, serve only to reinforce the erotically charged nature of Trevenna’s relations with other men, and point to nothing less than a fantasy of brutal rape:37 Thrown back there, with his bare chest grand as the chest of a Torso, and the luxuriance of his hair tangled and tossed and lustreless, yet retaining the beauty which nature had created in him deathless to the last, [Chandos] lay like a young gladiator flung down in the sand of the arena by the clinging serpentine coils of the Retiarius … [Trevenna] looked upward to where the shouts of ‘Euge!’ and the turned-down hands decreed with him no mercy to the vanquished, and he plunged in again and again the fangs of his trident, seeing the last life-blood … he would never have wearied of stabbing again and again, while there was life to feel. (p. 221)

For an excellent discussion of Trevenna’s erotic attachment to Chandos, see Natalie Schroeder and Shari Hodges Holt, Ouida the Phenomenon: Evolving Social, Political and Gender Concerns in Her Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 54–62. 37

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Under Two Flags (1867) Having outed Ouida as a woman writer, Geraldine Jewsbury’s review of Under Two Flags acknowledged the author’s ‘remarkable power of evolving out of her own inner conscious an imitation of the slang and gossip and barrack scandal of the French soldiers’.38 In fact, Ouida had a number of sources to hand, and the Saturday Review came close to the truth when it supposed that she was ‘well crammed’.39 John Sutherland suggests Antoine Camus’ Zéphyrs, Spahis, Turcos, Tringlos: Les Bohèmes du Drapeau (1863) as one likely source.40 The accuracy of her descriptions of the different corps of the Armée d’Afrique was evidently very important to Ouida, and it is the case that she made one significant correction to the text of the novel when it was eventually published in book form, amending all reference to the Spahis to Chasseurs in Ch.12, ‘In the Café of the Chasseurs’ (formerly Ch.18, ‘In the Café of the Spahis’, February 1866).41 Of course, Ouida had another source closer to home: that of the anonymously authored ‘Scenes of Franco-Arab Life’, which was serialized in the British Army and Navy Review between December 1864 to September 1865, and thus overlapped with the early chapters of Under Two Flags.42 The political and cultural contexts provided by ‘Scenes’ – the consistently anti-French sentiment, the narrator’s unequivocal sympathy with the colonized Arabs, and the detailed and vivid evocation of camp life – are elements poached by Ouida and recycled wholesale.43 It is further worth noting that after the completion of ‘Scenes’, a brief addendum appeared in the November 1865 issue, which reminded readers of the extraordinary transformation of Algeria within the past 50 years since it had become a French dependency. The (again anonymous) author of ‘Algeria Rev. of Under Two Flags, Athenaeum, 2103, 15 February 1868, pp. 248–9, p. 249. Rev. of Under Two Flags, Saturday Review, 21 January 1868, p. 120. 40 Ouida, Under Two Flags (1867), ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University 38 39

Press, 1995), p. x. All subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. Sutherland notes the publication of an English translation in 1864. 41 This was the only major revision to the text undertaken by Ouida, bar a single reference to Cigarette’s fallen sexuality as a ‘fille perdue’ which was cut when the novel was first published by Chapman & Hall (from ch. 20, ‘L’Amie du Drapeau’, March 1866, p. 223). On the whole, any amendments are purely editorial: on occasion, short chapters from the serial are combined in the book version, and lengthy paragraphs broken up; some French terms are re-written in English; some chapter titles are revised; and excessively long passages cut. 42 I have been unable to discover the identity of the author, or whether ‘Scenes’ were reissued in book form. 43 Compare, for example, the author’s description of the Grand Mosque ‘turned into a vulgar trysting-place for the garrison and the demi-monde of a third-rate French town’, ‘The Place Du Gouvernement’, ch. 2, ‘Scenes of Franco-Arab Life’, British Army and Navy Review, 1 (December 1864), pp. 503–10, p. 509, with similar passages in Under Two Flags, 1, ch.13, p. 160, and 2, ch. 2, pp. 191–2.

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Fifty Years Ago’ inveighs against the French policy of brutal suppression (Arabs are ‘hunted […] down’) and French philistinism, which, disregarding the ‘grave and noble simplicity of [Arab] life’), imported a ‘Paris-tinted atmosphere’ – a two-pronged critique of French colonialism that lies at the heart of Ouida’s novel.44 Another key literary source flagged up by Ouida in her 1867 dedication of Under Two Flags to Colonel George Poulett Cameron, is Cameron’s 1853 book of memoirs, Romance of Military Life: Being Souvenirs Connected with Thirty Years Service.45 Cameron’s is a curious text: purporting to provide episodes from his own military experience and that of his fellow officers, the fifth and final narrative, ‘Harcourt’ takes up three-quarters of the volume; ostensibly the fragmentary record of an unnamed ‘brother officer’ (p. v), and edited by Cameron with extensive footnotes, the story reads not as an autobiographical record but as a (poorly constructed) novel. Under Two Flags is in many ways a tribute to Cameron. Romance of Military Life, which was re-published in 1858, pre-dates Ouida’s friendship with Cameron which began when she was living at the Langham. Cameron’s account of his own book as a ‘mélange of sketches of travel, history, descriptive scenes, and anecdote’, aptly serves to describe Ouida’s own plundering of fictional and non-fictional sources.46 Whereas ‘Scenes of Franco-Algerian Life’ provided her with local colour and a precise political and cultural context for her story, Cameron’s Romance furnished her with a plot. Captain Mortlake, provoked by his jealousy of his handsome young officer, Edward Harcourt, challenges him to a duel. Harcourt shoots Mortlake dead and is forced to flee into exile; debarred from fighting under his own flag, he first serves under Napoleon (the story opens in 1793) and then a Maharajah in India. The parallels between the two narratives are innumerable, but it worth rehearsing some of the main points here in order to demonstrate the degree to which Ouida was consciously re-working Cameron’s text. Briefly told, Under Two Flags relates the career of the Hon. Bertie Cecil, ‘an inconceivably effeminate’ young guardsman, known as ‘Beauty’, whose younger brother Berkeley forges a cheque in the name of Cecil’s bosom friend Lord Rockingham, known familiarly as ‘Seraph’, in order to relieve his debts. Stung by shame, Cecil decides to take the blame upon himself (there is the added matter of Cecil’s unwillingness to prove his innocence which would implicate ‘Algeria Fifty Years Ago’, British Army and Navy Review 3 (November 1865), 464–79. The first quotation is taken from p. 475, the second two from p. 464. 45 Ouida’s lengthy dedication runs as follows: ‘To Colonel Poulett Cameron, CB, KCT & S, & C., whose family has given so many brilliant soldiers to the armies of FRANCE AND ENGLAND, and made the battle-fields of Europe ring with ‘THE WAR-CRY OF LOCHEIL’, this STORY OF A SOLDIER’S LIFE is dedicated in SINCERE FRIENDSHIP’, Under Two Flags, ed. John Sutherland, p. 1. 46 George Poulett Cameron, Romance of Military Life: Being Souvenirs Connected with Thirty Years Service (London: G. Cox, 1858), p. iv. All subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. 44

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his current mistress, a married woman), and he absconds. A false report that Cecil has been fatally injured in a train crash enables him to refashion a new identity. He eventually picks up in Algeria and enlists with the French army. Cecil’s devoted manservant, Rake, comes too and joins the ranks. As a Chasseur in the Armée d’Afrique, Cecil undergoes a wondrous transformation and wins the loyalty of his men owing to his heroic skirmishes with the indigenous Arabs, so much so that he also excites the jealous hatred of his commander, Colonel Chateauroy. Cecil also finds himself subject to the unwanted attentions of the camp vivandière, Cigarette, who, with her boyish looks and manner is an inversion of Cecil’s womanly man. Cecil’s buried identity is, however, quite safe until the camp is visited by a party of aristocratic tourists, which number Berkeley, Seraph, and Seraph’s sister, Lady Venetia. Cecil is distraught at the thought that Seraph might recognize his lost friend – who, to all appearances, had betrayed him – and enlists the help of Cigarette and Venetia to prevent their meeting (and, in the process, falls in love with Venetia). When her reputation is slandered by Chateauroy (who catches Cecil leaving her tent one night), Cecil strikes him in the face. This is the opportunity Chateauroy has been waiting for: ‘At last he had hounded down this man, so long out of his reach, into disobedience and contumacy’ (p. 489). Cecil is duly court-martialled and sentenced to execution by firing-squad. Cameron’s ‘Harcourt’ provided Ouida with both the central theme of an innocent man forced into a life of exile under an assumed name, and the persecution he suffers from an unscrupulous commander. Mortlake and Chateauroy are brutish, despotic, and given to outbreaks of ungovernable passion (whereas Harcourt and Cecil and distinguished by their manly control, and inspire exemplary behaviour in their troops). Interestingly, Cameron (running out of ideas) then revives the tense situation between Mortlake and Harcourt, having the latter sign up in the private army of the Maharajah Jesunt Row Holkar, whose early admiration for the handsome officer descends into paranoid delusions and vindictive rages. Holkar’s ‘phrensied passion’ (p. 292) and ‘tiger-like glare’ (p. 295) recall the jealous temper of Mortlake. Both Harcourt and Cecil bury their British identity when they enrol under another flag: Harcourt becomes ‘d’Harcourt’ under Napoleon and ‘Dharcoor Sahib’ under the Maharajah; Bertie Cecil assumes two of his baptismal names to become ‘Louis Victor’. Yet neither is able to disguise his gentlemanly identity. Both men are tortured by their outlaw status and betray the British flag with reluctance. Cecil’s ability to rouse the dark passion of Chateauroy is, in itself, worthy of examination. The origins of Chateauroy’s jealousy lie, as we have seen, in Poulett Cameron’s Romance of Military Life, but in Ouida’s hands the dynamic comes closer to that described in Melville’s 1891 novella Billy Budd, a text so richly analyzed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.47 Chateauroy’s jealousy of Cecil, known to his men as ‘Bel-à-faire-peur’ (‘A woman’s face!’) (p. 176), is escalated by See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, pp. 91–130.

47

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his class envy of ‘old blood’; his desire to see him shot foreshadows Claggart’s homophobic persecution of Billy who is also court-martialled and executed for his insubordination (under extreme provocation). Would it be too much to say, as Sedgwick says of Melville’s text, that Cecil’s very identity as Bel-à-faire-peur is on trial? Cecil’s men, we’re told, ‘grew still and fear-stricken with a great awe when the muttering passed through the camp that they would see no more amongst their ranks that “woman’s face” which they had beheld so often foremost in the fight, with a look on it that thrilled their hearts like the forbidden chant of the Marseillaise’ (p. 495). In recent years, Under Two Flags has understandably attracted the notice of a number of feminist critics interested in Ouida’s conception of a dandified English aristocrat who is confronted by a heroine ‘who appropriates all the characteristics of the male hero’, and who couldn’t be more unEnglish.48 Pamela Gilbert and Talia Schaffer consider just how this peculiar hero and heroine complement each other in the text, and how it is that Cecil’s effeminacy is somehow contained, even validated (for Gilbert, this troubling aspect of his identity is rendered ‘neutral’ by nature of the fact that it’s a sign of his aristocratic blood, and is of course ‘balanced by a “masculine” self-control and sense of honour’), whereas Cigarette’s manliness is, as Schaffer puts it, simply ‘too revolutionary for the novel to contain her’, necessitating her textual substitution by the correctly feminine Venetia (a mere cipher of Victorian femininity), and ultimately her death.49 I want to re-visit Cigarette’s role within the context of the male romance narrative and contemporaneous literary expressions of romantic friendship as described by Oulton. Such a context gives the reader less reason to rehabilitate Cigarette as a proto-feminist.50 The encoding of male friendship is signalled throughout the text: we learn of the Zouave who is famed for once having ‘substituted himself for, and received 50 blows in the loins in the stead of his sworn friend, whom he loved with that love of David for Jonathan, which in Caserne [barrack] life, is readier found than in Club life’ (p. 195); Cecil loves the Arab chief Ilderim ‘as he never loved a woman’ (p. 236) (a play on II Samuel, 1.26, in which David speaks of his love for Jonathan), whilst Rake, in yet another variation on David and Jonathan, loves 48 Carol Poster, ‘Oxidisation is a Feminist Issue: Acidity, Canonicity, and Popular Victorian Female Authors’, College English, 58.3 (March 1996), 287–306, p. 300. 49 Pamela K. Gilbert, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 145; Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 2000), p. 126. 50 See, for example, Schroeder and Holt’s recent discussion of Cigarette as ‘the Ouidean New Woman of the 1860s’, Ouida the Phenomenon, pp. 74–7. That said, Cigarette did inspire Edith Sandford’s equestrian drama of Under Two Flags (subsequently re-titled Firefly) which opened at the Surrey Theatre in 1869 (see Appendix 3), and the French translation of the novel was issued as Cigarette; Cantinière aux Zouaves, 2 vols (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1883).

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Cecil with ‘a fidelity passing the fidelity of woman’ (p. 409); every man wants to be Cecil’s special friend (p. 395). Readerly pleasure is satisfied in the Algerian section by leisurely (and in narrative terms, superfluous) descriptions of sensuous male beauty – thus the account of naked soldiers asleep at the opening of volume 2, Chapter 8. Cigarette’s sensational self-sacrifice is robbed of significance when we consider that her death is prefigured in the text, not once, but twice: Cecil’s closest male comrades, his former manservant, Rake, keeper of Cecil’s buried identity, and Léon Ramon – ‘a man once beautiful as a Greek dream of a god’ (p. 302), ‘whom he had loved, and who had loved him’ (p. 313) – also die in his arms after having pledged their love for him. Even Cigarette’s very last words lack originality: ‘If I could only see France once more! France―’ (p. 526), are those previously uttered by Léon (p. 313). Cecil takes it upon himself to carve Léon’s gravestone, and wishes he could die alongside his comrade. A few chapters on, Rake is mortally wounded in the groin while on a dangerous night-ride with Cecil across the desert in order to carry word to a distant French encampment; Cecil keeps vigil through the night, ‘thrown down upon the grave’ (p. 417). The slippery ambiguity between textual signifiers in these scenes – the movement between the literal deaths of Cecil’s comrades and the resonances with his own, figuratively, buried life, come to a heady resolution when Cecil is confronted by the vision of Seraph (‘it seemed like the resurrection of the dead’) (p. 390). Their actual meeting is withheld until the moment at which Cecil awaits his execution by firing-squad, standing before his coffin and ‘yawning grave’ (p. 518): ‘Their eyes met. A great shuddering cry broke from them both; [Cecil’s] head sank as though the bullets had already pierced his breast, and the friend who believed him dead stood gazing at him, paralysed’ (pp. 518–19). Why is it imperative that Cecil and Seraph don’t meet in Algiers? Male–male love, which is validated in the Caserne, is treated as a criminal act when Cecil recognizes his lost friend and is overwhelmed by ‘one forbidden longing’ (p. 390): he tells Venetia, ‘I cannot – I dare not’ acknowledge Seraph, ‘unless I could meet him as we never shall meet upon earth’ (p. 443); Cecil even contemplates deserting in order to evade ‘the friend whose love he feared’ (p. 475). It is after they have embraced and Seraph is ordered to stand aside that Cigarette intervenes, in a supremely sacrificial gesture – shielding Cecil, so that she is shot by the firing-squad – that allows Cecil and Seraph to be re-united. Her death is superfluous – she carries Cecil’s reprieve in her bosom – yet, according to the logic of the homosocial narrative, it is requisite that she is sacrificed, since by her death ‘in his stead’ she blesses the bond between men. Under Two Flags was to be the last of Ouida’s male romances; in it, she pushes the culturally legitimate boundaries of romantic friendship to their limit. To that extent, Ouida prepared the ground for fin de siècle male romances which figure the suppressed love between men as a buried self. My final gesture towards a homoerotic reading of the text, one that draws on the previous scholarship of Schroeder and Holt, Gilbert and Schaffer, as well as making a direct link to

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end-of-the-century homosexual men, is to suggest that Cecil’s empty grave can be read symbolically. In a famous letter to J.A. Symonds dated 5 March 1890, Edmund Gosse described the secret lives of nineteenth-century homosexuals as a kind of ‘death’: ‘The position of a young man so tormented is really that of a man buried alive and conscious, but deprived of speech. He is doomed by his own timidity and ignorance to a repression which amounts to death’.51 The literal grave before which Cecil is pinned is a fitting metaphor for his buried love for Seraph and the buried lives of homosexual men in Victorian Britain.

51 Quoted by Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988), p. 80.

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PART II Rewriting Ouida

Fig. 4.1

Internal pages of programme for the adaptation of Ouida’s Moths by Henry Hamilton at the Olympic Theatre, London, April, 1882

Chapter 4

‘A hack as harmful as he is brainless and, one, moreover, who stabs where he steals.’ Ouida, the Victorian Adaptor and Moths Hayley Jayne Bradley

‘Why anyone, though fond of jokes, Should care to write about such folks: – Whatever readers find to please In individuals like these; And why an author wastes his days In turning such things into plays – Not all the wealth of Ouida-land Could ever make me understand!’ Ouida-Land. (By one who has read all the novels, and just seen the play of Moths)1

Published in 1880, Moths was the 15th novel written by Ouida. Credited for being her greatest success, both artistically and financially, Moths proved so popular that even Mudie’s library could not meet the lending demand for copies.2 A novel of high society, Moths offered the Victorian reader a critical, often cutting, assessment of the upper strata of the social hierarchy. Within this micro-world, where extravagance and opulence thinly veiled a cruel and corrupt community of ‘callous men and worldly women’,3 Ouida tackled a range of topical and taboo issues including class, gender, infidelity, divorce law and domestic violence. All of this, when combined with the novel’s melodramatic incidents and foreign settings, made Moths an attractive opportunity for the Victorian dramatist. Cultural demand for adaptations as a source of popular entertainment along with economic reasons for producing them converged during the Victorian period. Adaptations offered a guaranteed audience who came to see them either to relive 1 ‘Ouida-Land,’ Fun ‘(By one who has read all the novels, and just seen the play of Moths)’, 14 October 1885, p. 170. 2 See Jane Jordan, ‘Ouida: How Conceptions of the Popular Reader Contributed to the Making of a Popular Novelist’, in A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900, eds Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 37–54, p. 49. 3 Ouida, Moths, ed. Natalie Schroeder (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2005), p. 105.

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the pleasure of reading the novel or because publicity arising from the novel piqued their interest. The lack of any detailed and thorough legal protection of artistic copyright allowed dramatists to freely ‘borrow’ and legitimately adapt the works of others, providing a plentiful source of ideas for dramatization. Much to her annoyance, Ouida would find that ‘book after book’ of hers would be ‘seized by these pirates of the green-room’ as a source for stage adaptation; none would be so publically contested as Moths.4 Natalie Schroeder’s introduction to the 2005 Broadview edition of Moths notes that ‘Moths was adapted as a play and successfully produced at the Globe theatre in London in 1883’.5 But Schroeder’s brief acknowledgement of a single, unaccredited, adaptation underestimates the sheer number of Moths adaptations. This chapter re-evaluates and broadens Schroeder’s statement first by highlighting the controversy between Ouida and the adaptor over the question of dramatic copyright; second by examining the first adaptation of Ouida’s novel and its reception; and, finally, by drawing attention to a succession of Moths adaptations and their adaptors in the late-Victorian period. Two years after the publication of the novel, Moths opened on 25 March 1882 in an afternoon matinée at the Globe Theatre, London. It was the debut work of Henry Hamilton (1855–1918), a 27-year-old actor who, over a 45-year career in the theatrical profession worked as an actor, dramatist, lyricist, company manager, director and adaptor. Hamilton wrote in excess of 40 plays during his life time, collaborated on numerous Drury Lane successes with Augustus Harris (1852–96), and Cecil Raleigh (1856–1914),6 and worked with some of the most renowned actors and actresses of the day: Henry Irving (1838–1905), Lewis Waller (1860– 1915) and Mrs Patrick Campbell (1865–1940). The premiere of Hamilton’s play was preceded by a storm of controversy. Dramatists and novelists alike had for some time been engaged in debate over issues of copyright, ownership of work and originality of ideas. When Hamilton’s adaptation of Moths was first announced, parties from opposing sides forcefully defended their own position. It was to be a debate staged via the public press, and was initiated by Ouida herself. Just over two weeks before the opening of Hamilton’s adaptation, Ouida, still bruised by an earlier, unsuccessful, dramatization by Walter Stevens of her second novel, Strathmore (1865), wrote to the editor of The Times a letter that later also appeared in The Era, a weekly trade paper for members of the theatrical profession.7 ‘Dramatic Thefts’, The Times, 16 March, 1882, p. 10. Ouida, Moths, pp. 12–13. 6 The Armada; A Romance of 1588 (1888), The Royal Oak (1889), The Derby Winner 4

5

(1894), Dick Whittington (1894), Cheer, Boys, Cheer! (1895), and, after Harris’ death in 1896 (with Drury Lane under the management of Arthur Collins), The White Heather (1897), The Great Ruby (1898), The Sins of Society (1909), The Marriages of Mayfair (1909), The Whip (1909), The Hope (1911), Sealed Orders (1913), The Best of Luck (1916). 7 Ouida’s original letter, under the title ‘Dramatic Thefts’ appeared in The Times on 16 March 1882, p.10 and in ‘Dramatic Thefts’, Era, 11 March 1882, p. 4. The apparently earlier date of the Era can be explained by how weeklies (like the Era) often predated their issues. See Appendix 3 for details of this and other theatrical adaptations of Ouida in Britain.

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I hear and see a statement to the effect that my last novel, ‘Moths’ is about also to be dramatised at the Court Theatre; some say at the Globe. I have not been consulted in the matter by even so much as a courteous formality of request for permission or acquiescence. I became accidentally acquainted with the fact that persons unknown to me are about to use my work for their own purposes and benefits. I beg hereby to protest most emphatically against such robbery, because, in the present ridiculous state of the copyright laws, it is not one legally punishable.8

Having blamed the ‘terrible lacuna of the law’ regarding copyright, Ouida then proceeds to attack adaptors (the ‘Dick Turpins of the dramatic profession’), and playwrights in general (whom she accuses of ‘slink[ing] in safety behind the law’s indifference’) insisting that ‘to myself no payment, not the greatest, could in any way compensate for the annoyance and the injury which are entailed on any romance (and especially on a story of society) by being dragged on the stage, cut and clipped, travestied, and dressed up in vulgar, ill-fitting clothes.’9 Her comments were met with swift, and often scathing, rebuttals by notable authors and actors including W.S. Gilbert, Herman. C. Merivale, Arthur Wing Pinero, John Hollingshead, Marie Litton,10 Henry Irving and Henry Hamilton himself. Hamilton’s reply to Ouida’s ‘virulent’ letter vigorously refutes Ouida’s charges, and claims that he never intended to misrepresent his adaptation as entirely his own work; he assures her that she was to have received a request for permission prior to production.11 Further, Hamilton asserts that he had in no way trespassed against the law or literary probity – he had merely been exercising a right which the law had given him (a right which Hermann C. Merivale, defending adaptation ‘Dramatic Thefts,’ The Times, 16 March 1882, p. 10. Wilkie Collins shared a similar experience. When he heard that his novel, Poor Miss Finch (1872), was to be dramatized without his permission, he remarked that ‘I have been asked to dramatise it, and I have refused, because my experience tells me that the book is eminently unfit for stage purposes’ (Wilkie Collins as quoted in James Neville Porter, ‘The Dramatisation of Novels’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 40 [1879], 245–51, p. 245). 9 ‘Dramatic Thefts,’ The Times, 16 March 1882, p. 10. 10 Marie Litton (also known as Mrs W. Wybrow-Roberston) played Vere Herbert in Hamilton’s adaptation of Ouida’s Moths. It was to be her last role; on 1 April 1884, after 16 years on the stage, she died from a ‘serious’ and ‘unknown’ illness (The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, ‘The Late Miss Litton,’ April 5, 1884, p. 68). 11 Hamilton did credit Ouida as the source for his adaptation, as reviews and programmes attest, with the statement that Moths was ‘Founded on and principally adapted from OUIDA’S Novel of that name’. Hamilton’s adaptation had been licensed under the title ‘The Star and the Flame,’ a title Ouida classed as both ‘ridiculous’ and ‘melo-dramatic’ (The Times, ‘Dramatic Thefts,’ 16 March, 1882, p. 10). However, in response to her public protest, Hamilton made the following announcement: ‘If anything can give “Ouida” happiness in the affair she may, perhaps, be happy to learn that I have decided to produce my play under her own picturesque and suggestive title “Moths”’ (‘Dramatic Thefts’, Era, 25 March, 1882, p. 5). 8

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as ‘legitimate work,’ would label as a silence of the law rather than a sanction).12 In response to Ouida’s claim that the adaptor is ‘a hack as harmful as he is brainless, and one, moreover, who stabs where he steals,’ Hamilton argues that, far from harming the text, a dramatization of a novel was both a tribute to its merits and an advertisement of them.13 Hamilton concludes that he can assure Ouida … that it has cost me far more time and pains to dramatise her novel, endeavouring to adhere to its spirit and to do justice to its great and indisputable beauties, while removing what was objectionable and useless, than it would have done to write an entirely original play.14

Hamilton’s compliment, barbed and back-handed though it be, signals the main tasks of the adaptor: to extract, simplify and conflate the merits of the original and omitting its weak points, while simultaneously maintaining a fidelity to the authorial truths and popular components of the original. The public exchange of letters on the subject of Hamilton’s adaptation of Moths ran over three issues of The Era.15 Ouida’s criticism of the ‘ridiculous state of the copyright laws’ and her portrayal of herself as a victim of robbery were both inflammatory and inaccurate, but her deep sense of personal injury does point to a general confusion surrounding copyright laws. In response to Ouida’s letter, Herman C. Merivale outlined the means by which she might protect her work from ‘land-rats’ by making her own dramatic version of the novel, having it performed once in public and registering the play at Stationer’s Hall;16 the journalists John Hollingshead and Moy Thomas both insisted that the play version must also be published. 17 Marie Litton, who would star as Vere Herbert on the very night that her letter was published in The Era, offered the most erudite and comprehensible explanation of copyright and stage right as outlined in the Copyright Law.18 14 15

‘Dramatic Thefts,’ Era, 25 March 1882, p. 5. ‘Dramatic Thefts,’ Era, 11 March 1882, p. 4. ‘Dramatic Thefts,’ Era, 25 March 1882, p. 5. A similar dispute would be argued via the pages of The Era in 1884 between the French novelist, Georges Ohnet and the British novelist/dramatist Robert Buchanan. Ohnet accused Buchanan of the ‘downright plagiarism’ of his novel Le Maître de Forges. While Buchanan had, and did again, acknowledge Ohnet as the source on which his play ‘Lady Clare’ was founded, he responded by listing four detailed points of distinction between the two citing differences in ‘psychology, in dramatic arrangement, in character, and in dialogue’ along with the addition of ‘light comedy portions’, ‘“Lady Clare” & “Le Maître De Forges”’, Era, 5 January 1884, p. 12. 16 ‘Dramatic Thefts,’ Era, 25 March 1882, p. 5. 17 Hollingshead and Thomas together published a penny paper called The Mail in the 1850s and were regular contributors to Household Words (see John Drew, ‘Household Words’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, eds Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor [British Library, 2008], 292–3, p. 293). Their comments were printed in the ‘Dramatic Thefts’ articles of The Era on 18 March 1882, p. 8 and 25 March 1882, p. 5. 18 The Dramatic Copyright Act as passed on 10 June 1833. 12 13

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A novelist may protect himself or herself therefore if, prior to the issuing of his or her novel to the public, he or she should one afternoon, by the use of some paste and a pair of scissors, construct a rough play from the novel, and give an ordinary representation, almost in any form, in some place of public entertainment – with slight ingenuity this could easily be done for less than £5. Novelists, therefore, if they think it worth while, may easily protect themselves. If they fail to do so they should not use intemperate language, unless, indeed, they apply such language to themselves for their own want of foresight or care.19

Ironically, although novelists therefore had the means by which to protect their work, should they so wish, the dramatists did not. As Arthur Wing Pinero’s reply to Ouida illustrates, dramatists were also victims of the imperfections of copyright law. Now-a-days, on the production of a successful play, the writer of any novel dealing with the same theme, however common the theme, and permeated with the same atmosphere, however general the atmosphere, may start up and claim the sole title to a common subject, and charge the playwright with theft. The cause of the accuser is, of course, supported by the rivals of the successful dramatist, and the sale of the novel is advanced fifty per cent.20

Ouida and Hamilton’s dispute over Moths, and the subsequent argument that it initiated in the press, was ultimately, albeit unintentionally, an advertising coup which promoted both Ouida’s novel and Hamilton’s play. It benefited both parties involved, as The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post observed when Moths was performed at the New Theatre Royal: ‘the belief in literary circles is that, whilst the advent of the drama was most fortunately heralded by “Ouida’s” attack, the literary fortunes of the novelist have been at the same time materially helped by Mr Hamilton’s defence and defiance.’21 Hamilton’s adaptation was by no means as ‘harmful’ to her as Ouida had initially claimed. Contemporary British fiction offered a plentiful source of characters, plots and incidents for the dramatist to seize upon. Walter Scott and Charles Dickens were the most prolifically adapted novelists between 1850–1900, but theatres across the country offered adaptations of the works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Mrs Henry Wood, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy and many others. Novels of ‘the moment’ held the greatest attraction for the dramatist and the maximum promise of profit and popularity. Ouida’s novels, like those by the major sensation novelists Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade and Rhoda Broughton were a fashionable and plentiful source for adaptation. First, however, they had to have the necessary components of interesting characters, intriguing plots and exciting incidents, all of which were to be found not only in Moths ‘Dramatic Thefts,’ Era, 25 March 1882, p. 5. ‘Dramatic Thefts,’ Era, 18 March 1882, p. 8. 21 ‘“Moths” at the New Theatre Royal’, The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 26 19 20

October 1883, p. 3.

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but in a number of Ouida’s other novels which were dramatized – Strathmore (1865), Under Two Flags (1867), Idalia (1867), Tricotrin (1869), Puck (1870), and Folle-Farine (1871). However, just as with contemporary film and television adaptations, there were great departures from the originals, and for that reason it is necessary to summarize the plots of both novel and relevant dramatizations to enable their comparison and the identification of significant elements. The Novel: Moths by Ouida In the original novel of Moths, 16-year-old Vere Herbert is sent from her grandmother’s rural house into the custody of her mother, Lady Dolly Vanderdecken, a woman whose daily occupation is display and dissipation, and whose initial disgust at Vere’s plain attire is only outweighed by her horror at being called mother. Swift to be rid of her new appendage, Lady Dolly sets about finding a husband for her daughter, unaware that Vere meanwhile has formed the acquaintance of the great opera singer, Raphael de Corrèze. Corrèze is captivated by Vere’s sweet, sincere nature, and, concerned for her preservation amongst a society of corrupting moths, he proposes himself as suitor. Lady Dolly declines his offer and focuses her attention on the eligible but elusive Prince Zouroff, a man of ‘great wealth’ and ‘great position.’22 Heedless of the warnings of her lover, Lord Jura, as to the true brutish nature of the Prince, Lady Dolly emotionally blackmails the reluctant Vere into consenting to marry Zouroff. Lord Jura, disgusted and appalled, leaves Lady Dolly, and Vere is left in loveless married martyrdom pining for Corrèze. With Vere now his property by marriage, Prince Zouroff begins his emotional, physical, mental and sexual abuse. Quickly tiring of his latest purchase he returns to his mistress, Duchess Jeanne de Sonnaz (and his two courtesans, Casse-une-Croute, and the Creole actress, Noisette). Trapped in a noxious and tormented marriage with only her sense of duty to console her, Vere is relieved when a year into her marriage she miscarries her first child. Chance meetings with Corrèze offer the only joys in her life, and from Paris to Poland Vere offers help to the poor. Three years on, the battle of wills between Prince Zouroff and Vere reaches its climax when, after discovering her husband’s true relationship with the Duchess de Sonnaz, Vere issues an ultimatum: that either she or Jeanne must leave the Prince’s house. When Zouroff tells Jeanne of the ultimatum and his intention not to bow to it, she is horrified and thrown into a state of panic that her husband, Paul, may discover her infidelity. Jeanne leaves, voluntarily, but the Prince (angered at the turn of events and the seeming display of his wife’s control), exiles Vere to his remote Polish estate, Szarisla. While in exile Vere has but four visitors, Corrèze (whom Vere makes leave her to her dutiful exile), the Prince’s sister Nadine, and the Duke and Duchess of Mull and Cantyre (Vere’s cousin and his bride, formerly Miss Fuschia Leach, an American heiress) who offer Vere sanctuary within their Ouida, Moths, p. 114.

22

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home. Touched by such an unexpected offer of kindness (she had formerly held Fuschia in low regard), Vere is moved to tears but refuses. Meanwhile, Corrèze approaches Nadine with a bid for Vere’s freedom which he asks her to present to Prince Zouroff: he will leave the world of music forever and retreat to a monastery if Prince Zouroff will end his relations with Jeanne and unconditionally invite Vere to return to society. The Prince declines, and when Corrèze sees an article published in the press that insinuates his own liaison with Vere, he challenges Prince Zouroff to publicly refute the allegations for the sake of Vere’s honour. When the Prince refuses, Corrèze strikes him three times and challenges him to a duel. When Vere receives a note from Prince Zouroff declaring that he has shot her ‘nightingale’ who ‘will sing no more,’ she rides overnight through the wolf-ridden forests of Szarisla to Corrèze’s bedside.23 While Vere comforts Corrèze, Zouroff – having persuaded his servants to give false testimony – has his marriage to Vere annulled. Outcasts from society, befriended only by Nadine and the Duke and Duchess, Vere and Corrèze live contentedly outside society in the French Alps. In the fashionable world, a divorced Prince Zouroff awaits his marriage to Jeanne (recently widowed by a horse-riding accident), and Lady Dolly cries a little over Lord Jura’s suicide, bemoaning, in the same breath, that she can no longer know her only daughter and the stupidity of the season which favours flat hair and unflattering bonnets. Ouida’s Moths, which ‘raced away at a terrific tempo from the first sentence and never slackened speed to the last page,’ presented an inviting opportunity for the adaptor and made it subject to a ‘general rush’ to transpose its arresting domestic drama to the stage.24 The Adaptation: Moths by Henry Hamilton When Henry Hamilton’s Moths opened at the Globe Theatre on 25 March 1882, it was one amongst several adaptations of popular novels to be staged that year. Alongside adaptations of Dickens’s works, Hamilton’s competition included Mrs Fairburn’s adaptation of Braddon’s Trail of the Serpent (entitled Dark Deeds), Robert Buchanan’s version of Lord Lytton’s Paul Clifford (entitled Lucy Brandon), and Thomas Hardy’s and J.W. Comyns Carr’s collaborative dramatization of Hardy’s own novel, Far From the Madding Crowd (which would follow on from Hamilton’s Moths at the Globe Theatre). Before Hamilton’s Moths was staged, he first had to adapt Ouida’s novel, subtracting from and contracting the source in a process H. Porter Abbott describes as a ‘surgical art.’25 Contending with public and professional pressure to remain Ouida, Moths, p. 533. Eileen Bigland, Ouida: The Passionate Victorian (London: Jarrolds, 1950),

23 24

p. 151; Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Late Nineteenth Century Drama 1850–1900, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946), I, p. 80. 25 H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 108.

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‘faithful’ to the original whilst negotiating perceptions of the adaptor as traitor (traditore traduttore) he was actually neither traitor nor guardian of a sacred text but instead creator of a piece of popular entertainment. Brander Matthews suggested that the playwright, when presented with a ‘good novel,’ required only ‘a few sheets of paper and a pair of scissors, a pen and a little plodding patience’ in order to procure an adaptation.26 For Hamilton, adaptation entailed a more painstaking process. He sought not only to identify and include the virtues of the novel and exclude the weaknesses but also to construct the plot line towards a series of climaxes. He cut the dramatis personae to streamline the story – and to reduce the cost of salaried actors – simplifying characterisation and back-story while writing expository dialogue to make up for the removal of the narrative voice. At the same time he tried to integrate the original’s key themes into the condensed action within a compressed timeline. Hamilton’s adaptation of Moths keeps to the dramatic structure of Ouida’s novel, and incorporates substantial amounts of dialogue lifted directly from the text, although he often adds his own Shakespearean/poetic allusions.27 The Belfast News Letter strangely remarked that it was to Hamilton’s credit that he did not think it ‘necessary to reproduce the “high-falutin” talk of the accomplished Lady’s impossible personages’.28 Whilst the list of dramatis personae shows the expected trimming, the characterization of the lead characters bears a strong resemblance to Ouida’s own creations. The only major adjustment to Ouida’s characterization is to escalate the machiavellian machinations of Jeanne de Sonnaz so that she embodies all the evils and ills of society. Hamilton’s Jeanne is clearly a moth hellbent on ‘corroding and consuming’ all that come into contact with her; and the artificial society that Ouida satirizes in its entirety is thus reduced down to Jeanne and Lady Dolly. 29 Brander Matthews, ‘The Dramatisation of Novels’, Longman’s Magazine, 14.84 (October 1889), p. 600. 27 Henry Hamilton, Moths, Lord Chamberlain’s Collection (Add. MSS 53266 O.). Hamilton opens each Act with a quotation that captures the essence of events that subsequently follow. Act I quotes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Maidenhood (1849), ‘Standing with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet, Womanhood and childhood fleet!’; Act II quotes Shakespeare’s Othello, ‘The hearts of old gave hands: our new heraldry is hands not hearts,’ (taken from Act III, Scene iv). For Act III Hamilton draws from Ouida’s Moths directly and Corrèze’s recollection of a Charles Kingsley sonnet from his 1856 collection of Poems, ‘No head but some world genius should rest, Above the treasures of that perfect breast. ...Yet thou art bound – O waste of nature! – to a shameless hound; to shameless lust ... Athene to a Satyr!’. Hamilton altered Kingsley’s original phrasing of ‘to a shameless hound; to shameless lust’ to ‘soulless hound.’ Act IV opens with a quotation from Tennyson’s Lancelot and Elaine (1856–85), ‘So let me pass, not all unhappy, having loved God’s best.’ Hamilton also integrated literary references into the dialogue of the play (for example, in Act I Hamilton draws from Shakespeare’s Othello as Lady Dolly describes Corrèze as the Cassio to her Iago). 28 The Belfast News-Letter, ‘Theatre Royal – “Moths”’, 14 November 1882, p. 5. 29 Ouida, Moths, p. 97. 26

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Hamilton not only included Ouida’s social observations and critique of her own sex into the adaptation but also what he saw as one of the novel’s key themes – men’s unjust treatment of women. When Prince Zouroff declares in Act IV that Vere is his property, he echoes Ouida’s own sentiments regarding marriage as a trade and the negligible differential between a paid prostitute and a purchased wife. Similarly, issues of sexual slavery, adultery and even domestic violence (in Act III Prince Zouroff strikes Vere ‘full in the face’, and attempts to do so again in Act IV) are represented in Hamilton’s play in a somewhat simplified, condensed but still powerful form. He was equally determined to translate the novel’s foreign and often grandiose settings to the stage. The four acts move from the gardens of Madame de Sonnaz’s hotel at Deauville to Prince Zouroff’s chateau, Felicité, to his palace at Svir and finally his castle in Poland. For each location Hamilton outlines his concept for the overall effect complete with a highly detailed set design that specifies everything from carpet colours to bespoke lighting. This attention to detail not only illustrates the move towards dramatic naturalism (one thinks of Ibsen’s stage set descriptions) but also demonstrates Hamilton’s ability to recognize from the novel the elements that an audience would pay to see staged. The European settings and depictions of exotic residences and ‘gay continental pleasure haunts’ as Eileen Bigland describes them, were amongst the main attractions of the novel, as they offered Ouida’s readers a glimpse of a privileged world to which they otherwise had no access.30 Although Hamilton transferred the core components of the novel into his adaptation he added his own creative input as adaptor to the dénouement of the play, and substantially changed the narrative climax of the final Act. Duke of Mull and Cantyre: He [Prince Zouroff] fell at Jura’s first fire, shot through the heart, and Jura, poor old Jura, he’s dying, wounded in the lungs. Vere is revived during last few lines and sits up. Servants carry in Jura. Lord Jura: Where, Where’s the princess? Vere comes forward I’ve kept my promise, I’ve saved him. Corrèze – stoop down – I can’t speak loudly, you’ll love her, be good to her, old fellow, I know, I needn’t tell you. Corrèze: his voice broken, Before God, I will. Lord Jura: Duchess – she must never know – remember you promised. Fuschia: I promised, I remember. Vere sobs hysterically Lord Jura: Princess Vere you mustn’t cry like that – for me – I’m awfully happy – don’t you remember that time at Felicité, I told you I’d be glad to die for you. I meant it – who was that they said about – ‘nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it’, that’s like me. I think, mine’s been a useless life – pleasure – full of fun – and all that – but I’ve tried to put on a spurt at the last and this is the best of it. I can’t speak – much – more. (Pause). Vere – are you there – it’s getting very dark – is that you holding my hand? – say – a – prayer – for – me – Vere sinks on her knees and whispers bless you dear – peace – in – that – a……h! Vere will – you – kiss – me!

Bigland, Ouida, The Passionate Victorian, p. 150.

30

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Vere stoops and kisses him and as she does so, his face lifts up momentarily, then with a sigh he falls back – dead – Slow curtain. End.31

Although in both the novel and the play the duel takes place off-stage, Hamilton changes the identities of the combatants and stages the duel between Prince Zouroff and Lord Jura.32 Hamilton’s switch of Lord Jura for Corrèze has several ramifications. First, Lord Jura dies a heroic death in the arms of the woman he secretly loves. Second, Prince Zouroff is shot dead, thus obviating the need for his divorce from Vere. Third, Corrèze is unharmed and, as he has committed no act of violence, he, like his beloved, remains ‘unspotted.’33 Even though Ouida grants ‘her’ Corrèze a similarly unspotted status (in the novel Corrèze deliberately fires his pistol into the air), she has him shot in the throat by Prince Zouroff. Hamilton’s alterations align the adaptation more closely to the dramatic conventions of Victorian melodrama and current theatrical tastes, effecting a potentially more satisfying resolution to the drama where the hero Corrèze is unharmed. But it also shifts Corrèze’s heroic status to Lord Jura. The tragic sacrifice of Lord Jura brings poignancy and moral reparation to the final scene as a man with a sullied past redeems himself in death. The adaptor has ascribed him a kinder fate than the author, and perhaps a more rewarding one for the audience. The villainous Prince Zouroff meets not only a more definitive ending but also a more just one in the eyes and hearts of the Victorian audience, who would expect to see the Manichean balance of good and evil restored at the end of the play. And, of course, whilst Hamilton has catered to the moral conventions of melodrama, he has also incorporated an element of surprise into the adaptation, thus meeting and exceeding popular expectations. With evil duly punished, the virtuous hero and heroine can arise to begin a new life bound by love. Whilst the final union of Vere and Corrèze echoes Ouida’s final chapter, the stage curtain falls on a world where justice and purity triumph absolutely, whereas Ouida’s novel returns to its high society roots and closes with a final comment on the hypocrisy of a false civilization and a dishonest, corrupt society and an implicit challenge to the reader to correct it.34 The ‘time’ and ‘pains’ Hamilton declared he had taken in adapting Ouida’s novel were insufficient for the reviewers. His version received mixed reviews and overall Hamilton’s adaptation, while popular with audiences, was considered by the critics to be ‘words, words, words and little beyond’.35 The Era criticized him for not having cut enough of the original text.36 Moreover, where Hamilton had Henry Hamilton, Moths, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection (Add. MSS 53266 O.) It is interesting that while Hamilton felt at liberty to make changes to the original,

31

32

he did not seize the dramatic opportunity of staging the duel. 33 Ouida, Moths, p. 97. 34 Ouida, Moths, p. 542. 35 ‘“Moths” at the Globe’, Era, 1 April 1882, p. 6. 36 ‘Dramatic Thefts’, Era, 11 March 1882, p. 4.

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altered Ouida’s plot in the final act, he was said to have ‘spoilt her, rather than improved her.’37 The verdict pronounced by the Era (written by a reviewer clearly biased towards Ouida) justifies its view by reference to an axiom of adaptation, that an adaptor must either adhere absolutely to the original or improve upon it. Another change in Hamilton’s version is the scene in which Lady Dolly manipulates her daughter into marrying Zouroff. This is a variation that has less to do with any particular creative impulse and more to do with the different circumstances and constraints under which a novelist and dramatist worked. For Ouida, there was always the possibility that her work could be rejected on moral grounds by individual editors, publishers and librarians. This was a risk rather than a certainty and bore a corresponding significance in her writing process. Hamilton’s play, however, was subject to the approval of the Lord Chamberlain’s office which distributed licenses for performance. It was therefore subject to the prim sensibilities and prudish sexual morality of a governing body which held the right of veto over his drama. It was a consideration which undoubtedly influenced his artistic decisions regarding the nature of Zouroff’s and Lady Dolly’s history.38 Whilst Ouida kept the reader guessing as to the exact nature of how Lady Dolly had manoeuvred her daughter into marriage, Hamilton instead overlooks the dramatic possibilities for tension and suspense and reveals all to the audience immediately. As the Era commented: Vere is obdurate until the wicked little woman whispers to her the lie that she is heavily in debt to the Prince. Vere is horrified and consents at once, but nobody else is shocked and nobody sympathises with her. The whole strength of the motive of the book has been destroyed in the play. Prudery has pushed nature on one side, and we have weak Hamilton in place of powerful Ouida.39

This reviewer’s comments were obviously noted by Hamilton and by the time the adaptation opened at the Olympic, less than a month after opening at the Globe, the scene had been altered: ‘Lady Dolly no longer talks about her indebtedness to Prince Zouroff, but by her whisper – unheard – in the ears of her daughter conveys that terrible suggestion which comes with some force and such surprise upon the readers of the novel.’40 Once again Hamilton’s adaptation had been compared unfavourably to the novel, and once again the novel had been upheld as the gold standard to be copied, not adapted. It was a criterion that stalked all adaptors, ‘“Moths” at the Globe’, Era, 1 April 1882, p. 6. For a discussion of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of adaptations of Ouida’s

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work, see Jane Jordan, ‘Romans français écrits en Anglais’: Ouida and Fin-de-Siècle Literary Censorship’, Women’s Writing, 20.2 (2013), 247–62. John Chute’s was the most daring adaptation of Moths, and he found himself duly censored by the Lord Chamberlain’s office: explicit references to the nature of the relationships between Lady Dolly and Lord Jura, and between Zouroff and Jeanne de Sonnaz, had to be cut, as was Ouida’s comparison of marriage to prostitution. 39 ‘“Moths” at the Globe’, Era, 1 April 1882, p. 6. 40 ‘“Moths” at the Olympic’, Era, 29 April 1882, p. 8.

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but several months after Moths opened, Hamilton would at least be accorded the acknowledgement of having been more skilful than his contemporaries. In October 1882, Hartbury Brooklyn’s version of Ouida’s Chandos, entitled Chandos: Or the Jester Who Turned Traitor, opened at the Adelphi, and theatre critics were swift to compare Hamilton’s expertise to Brooklyn’s ‘violent hands’ which gave Ouida ‘far greater reason to protest’.41 Despite some critical reviews of his adaptation (and his performance as the Duke of Mull and Cantyre), Hamilton’s Moths enjoyed a long and successful career on stage.42 Having attracted ‘royal patronage and houses crowded nightly by fashionable audiences’, it had ‘taken a firm hold on the public’.43 After almost four months at the Olympic, Moths (and Hamilton) went on tour, including performances at the Theatre Royal Belfast (15 August 1882), the Prince of Wales, Liverpool (29 August 1882), Sadler’s Wells back in London (4 September 1882), the Theatre Royal, Bristol (19 September 1882, and again on 26 October 1883), the New Theatre Royal, Sheffield (10 October 1882), and in November the Prince of Wales, Birmingham, before returning to the Theatre Royal, Belfast (14 Novembet 1882), where it would receive enthusiastic reviews and be pronounced ‘far superior to the fiction’.44 Indeed, The Belfast News Letter declared Hamilton’s Moths ‘the best adaptation we have ever seen’ because it delivered both ‘the substance and the spirit of the story.’45 In later years, it would be performed at the Theatre Royal, Hull (7 August 1885), and in London at the Lyric (29 October 1890 and 29 October 1892), the Parkhurst (29 October 1891) and Brixton theatres (1 May 1899). The actress May Fortesque toured as its Vere throughout the 1880s and 1890s. In 1884, Hamilton reprised his role as the Duke of Mull and Cantyre for a benefit performance in aid of Charles Cartwright (who played Prince Zouroff); he did so again in 1886 for George Keogh and in 1887 for W.H. Griffith.46 In 1896 Hamilton’s ‘The London Theatres,’ Era, 7 October 1882, p. 9. Reviews of Hamilton’s performance as the Duke of Mull and Cantyre varied, some

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critiquing him as ‘not an actor of much power’ (The Entr’acte, ‘Olympic Theatre’, 6 May 1882, p. 11), others regarding him ‘excellent’ (‘“Moths” at the New Theatre Royal’, The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 26 October 1883, p. 3), and an actor with ‘marked ability’ (The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, ‘“Moths” at the New Theatre Royal’, 19 September 1882, p. 8). Hamilton would also take on the role of Lord Jura when Moths was performed at the Theatre Royal, Hull. His performance was regarded as ‘robust’ (‘“Moths” at the Theatre Royal’, The Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 7 August 1885, p. 4). 43 ‘Multiple Advertisements and Notices,’ Standard, 11 July 1882, p. 4. 44 ‘Theatre Royal – “Moths”’, Belfast News-Letter, 14 November 1882, p. 5. Three months prior to the performance of Hamilton’s Moths at the Belfast Theatre Royal, a burlesque satirizing his adaptation was performed after an adaptation of Charles Dickens Bleak House by Mr G. Goddard Whyatt’s Company. 45 ‘Theatre Royal – “Moths”’, Belfast News-Letter, 14 November 1882, p. 5. 46 Theatrical benefits were a system of performances held in order to procure funds for members of the profession in which the basic expenses of the theatre would have to be paid but all further takings from the box office would go to the individual/fund in whose name it was performed. These benefits could be held either to supplement the income of a ‘star’ performer, add to a retirement fund with a ‘farewell benefit’ or, as in most cases, in order

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adaptation was revived for a one-off performance at the St James’s Theatre, in aid of the Actors’ Benevolent Fund. Despite the passage of fourteen years from its premiere, it was a success, playing to a crowded theatre and raising between £200 and £300.47 It held an enduring popularity, and was still being staged as late as 1907, at the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith. For Hamilton, Moths was his debut work as a dramatist, his instinct for both public taste and adaptation already sure. His choice of Ouida’s novel initiated a number of other Moths adaptations, and indeed versions of other works by Ouida. This was in accord with an established pattern of adaptation: where one dramatist went, several more followed swiftly behind, all eager to capitalize on proven commercial success. Even though Sarah Cardwell has declared that adaptations of adaptations (rather than adaptations of an ‘original’ source text) are an area without ‘conceptual interest,’ 48 the degree to which these subsequent dramatizations were in fact adaptations of the novel or more properly adaptations of previous adaptations – a common practice – can tell us a good deal about narrative transmission. For most of the adaptations of Moths, the dénouements remained crucial. One version by Dorothy Langdale retains Hamilton’s dénouement in which Lord Jura fights the duel with Zouroff.49 D.W. Edgar’s burlesque, Moths-Quitoes was clearly written in response to Hamilton’s adaptation with a very self-conscious return to and parody of Ouida’s original. Having been killed in a duel with Zouroff, Edgar’s Corrèze comes back to life and walks on stage offering to make up with Zouroff. In the concluding couplet, Fuschia Leach remarks, ‘It seems to me this ending ain’t quite right’, to which Lady Dolly replies, ‘Then p’rhaps we’ll alter it some other night’ (p. 29).50 Four months after Hamilton’s adaptation opened, a new version of Moths opened at the Theatre Royal, Croydon. This chronologically second adaptation of Moths was the debut work of long-term company manager, John C. Chute, who already had professional experience of stage adaptations. Indeed, he had appeared in the press in relation to a dispute over the copyright of J.B. Johnson’s stage version of Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne in 1869.51 While Chute went on to assist those who had either fallen ill (actors were not paid if they were sick or otherwise unable to perform) or suffered from financial difficulties. George Keogh was a theatrical manager and long term business manager for the famous Victorian actress and mistress to the Prince of Wales, Lillie Langtry. 47 W.H. Griffith was a theatre manager. His benefit was held at the Prince of Wales Theatre, 24 November 1887. While the reason for a benefit in his name is unknown, three other benefits were held in the same month for other actors/theatre managers: Miss Kate Phillips, 7 December, Haymarket Theatre, a fund raised to assist her recovery from illness; Mr Charles Warner, 9 December, Drury Lane, before his departure to Australia; Mr Arthur Goodrich, 2 January, Theatre unknown, to aid him financially after an operation to save his sight. ‘The Actors’ Fund Matinee’, Era, 9 May 1896, p. 13. 48 Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited – Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 19. 49 British Library Add. MSS 53288 I., licensed 7 February 1883. 50 British Library Add. MSS 53271 A., licensed 18 April 1882. 51 ‘East Lynne’, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 23 July 1869, p. 2.

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to collaborate on several original plays, his greatest successes were adaptations, first Moths and later, in 1892, Hugh Conway’s (Frederick John Fargus), popular novel Called Back. When Chute’s Moths opened, reviewers measured it against Hamilton’s adaptation (rather than comparing it to Ouida’s novel), the Era remarking that Chute’s version ‘follows pretty closely the Olympic play’.52 In relation to Hamilton’s final scene, however, Chute’s lengthy adaptation bears a more faithful stage rendering of the novel’s conclusion, with Prince Zouroff and the opera singer Corrèze duelling for Vere’s honour. Unlike his predecessor, Chute chose to stage the duel, situating it as the exciting climax of the drama. In Chute’s duel scene, Lord Jura explains to Zouroff and Corrèze that he will count to three, and then they must fire. On two, Zouroff prematurely fires and shoots Corrèze in the throat but, while the Prince delights in his marksmanship, Corrèze fires his single shot at the Prince. At this moment both Vere and the Duchess Jeanne de Sonnaz rush on stage and go to their respective loves. It is left to Lord Jura to lament that Zouroff will not die from his wounds as ‘such men are hard to kill’.53 The curtain falls as Corrèze presses Vere to his heart and Lord Jura declares that while Corrèze’s ‘voice is mute to the world, it is strong enough for love’.54 Chute’s adaptation failed either to adhere to the theatrical conventions of melodrama or to retain Ouida’s moral message. It lacked the longevity of Hamilton’s, but it was still ‘well received by a good house’,55 and played the Theatre Royal, Oxford (30 December 1882) and the Royal Greenwich Theatre (28 July 1883). In October 1882, a third adaptation of Moths was staged at the Royal Opera House, London. The dramatist, according to the Lord Chamberlain’s collection, is unknown, but while the author of the first two acts is unidentified, the third and fourth acts are signed on the manuscript as the work of Marion Grace.56 Grace, an actress by profession, already had an association with Moths, having toured with Florence Wade’s Company for most of 1882, during which time the company held the sole rights to perform Hamilton’s version at provincial theatres (while Hamilton’s adaptation continued to play in London). The tour was successful and Grace received acclaim for her performances, both as Nadine Nelaguine and Fuschia Leach.57 Miss Wade’s company ceased touring Hamilton’s Moths after 1882, and the existence of Grace’s own adaptation suggests that hers was prompted by a need for a different version for the same company. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it ‘Provincial Theatricals,’ Era, 2 September 1882, p. 8. John C. Chute, Moths, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection (Add. MSS 53276 H.),

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Act IV.

Ibid. ‘“Moths” – Theatre Royal’, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 30 December 1882, p. 5. 56 Allardyce Nicoll identifies Marion Grace as Marion Grace Webb in A History of Late 54 55

Nineteenth Century Drama, II. 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946). 57 The Belfast News-Letter remarked that ‘the Fuschia Leach of Miss Marion Grace was marked by a spirited and bold conception, and played with a sprightliness and good effect, the audience being highly amused at her love-making with the Duke’ (‘Miss Florence Wade and Company in “Moths”’, 10 November 1882, p. 5).

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strongly echoes the structure of Hamilton’s while also closely adhering to Ouida’s plot line and dialogue. The action moves in similar fashion from Trouville to Felicité to Svir, and the final act takes place in Prince Zouroff’s palace in Poland. As in Hamilton’s revision, Grace’s withholds the means of Lady Dolly’s manipulation of Vere until the final act, where the Duchess Jeanne reveals to Vere the letters from her mother in Zouroff’s possession. Incensed by the Duchess’s action, Vere delivers her ultimatum to Zouroff that either she or his mistress should leave his house that night. The Prince chooses Vere and instructs Jeanne to return to Paris immediately. A woman scorned, Jeanne threatens revenge. When Prince Zouroff and Corrèze rendezvous to duel, she reveals herself from behind a tree and fires at the Prince. With his dying breath, a now repentant Zouroff speaks the closing words of the play, confessing that Vere was honest, faithful and true, and that the moths have eaten the ermine and no power on earth can ever make it what it once was. Unlike her fellow adaptors, Grace creates a closing scene that is built upon the melodrama/sensation fiction model of the transgressive woman rather than the villainous man. As an adulteress, Jeanne has not only sinned against Victorian social codes and the prevailing ideals of womanhood, but, motivated by her desire for revenge, she also becomes a vengeful murderess. Grace’s purpose behind this substantial change to the plot-line of the novel could be attributed to her own intention to polarize the female characters to Manichean extremes. Both Jeanne and Vere determine their own fates and take action in order to change events, but they are mobilized by different emotions and motivations: Vere is a woman who suffers at the hands of her mother, her husband and society, yet, unlike Jeanne, she endures and does not seek retribution. Grace’s adaptation lingers in obscurity, unaccredited and unacknowledged, and to date it has been difficult, if not impossible, to trace its performance history beyond Covent Garden. The only other adaptation accredited to Grace is another dramatization of Ouida’s works, Puck (1870). Premiering in London at the Athenaeum in 1884 and performed subsequently at the Globe and the Olympic in 1885, Puck; or The Lass O’Moorside, is Grace’s only recognized play although the exact nature of her involvement in the staged version of the adaptation was controversial.58 Reviews of the play, subsequently renamed Heartless, heavily criticize its failing to transpose Ouida’s novel from page to stage and refer to an ‘anonymous dramatist’ as the adaptor. Punch, with typical wit, even declared that Ouida’s Puck had ‘Gone to the Dogs’.59 Partly in response to the negative reviews, and partly motivated by the injustice of her situation, Grace wrote to the Editor of The Era to explain her relationship to the production. In this instance it wasn’t only Ouida who had ‘good cause for complaint’.60 58 Prior to its London debut, Grace’s adaptation, Puck: Or The Lass O’Moorside, was performed in Bournemouth (1882), and Edinburgh (1884). 59 Punch, 25 April 1885, p. 202. 60 When reviewing ‘Heartless’ at the Olympic, The Times remarked that the adaptation gave Ouida ‘good cause of complaint’, 20 April 1885, p. 10.

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It was adapted by me at Miss Wade’s request, who paid me for the piece, with which I had nothing further to do; but directly it was Miss Wade’s property she proceeded to cut out every line that could draw attention from herself. She has left out whole scenes in which she was not; changed the studio of Carlos Merle into a room at the Coronet, where the action of the play is ridiculous because not likely to happen there, where Carlos would not be likely to be painting her portrait, and where Ben could never have found his way. The connections and explanations were all particularly clear; but they are cut out and language, not Ouida’s or mine, substituted. This, I take it, is a grievance. No doubt the play required pruning, &c; but if I were not allowed to do it surely some one who had studied Ouida’s language should have executed the task.61

The arrangement Grace had with Wade may mean that she also adapted Moths at the latter’s request for a one-off payment. Her Era letter also reveals the level of scrutiny and attention to detail that went into a Victorian adaptation, and equally how a dramatized version of a novel could misrepresent the original in order to bend it to a different purpose, i.e. highlight the ‘star’ performer and Miss Wade’s own agenda regarding her performance as Avice Dare.62 Almost a year after Hamilton’s adaptation premiered in London, Moths was still in vogue and yet another dramatist looked to it as a source for entertaining provincial theatre audiences. W.F. Lyon was both an experienced actor and dramatist and Moths was his second adaptation, his first having been Braddon’s Lucius Davoren, Or Publicans and Sinners (1871) adapted in 1881 as The Outlawed Son. Lyon performed in the West End during the February and March of 1882 – even performing at the Globe less than a month before Hamilton’s Moths premiered – and it is probable that during this period his attention first fell on Moths as an opportunity to cast himself in the role of Corrèze, which he subsequently played to mixed reviews. Lyon’s version of Ouida’s Moths was performed in Peterborough on 12 February 1883 and, like Hamilton, Chute and Grace before him, Lyon transfers the key elements of the novel direct to the stage, though with more concise dialogue and more rapid pacing of events. Yet again, of particular interest is Lyon’s conception of the play’s dénouement which differed both from Ouida’s and from those of his fellow adaptors. Lyon’s Act IV opens with Vere in exile in Szarisla where she has entered into the confidence of Zouroff’s serf, Ivan.63 Ivan confesses his sympathy for her imprisonment and swears revenge on Zouroff for the part he played in the demise and death of his father. Lyon has thus transformed Ouida’s character construction of a subservient spy to a figure of pity and compassion to develop another one of Ouida’s interwoven themes, class and servitude, and instead of applying it to a generalized group (as Ouida does in her portrayal of the brutalized serfs of Russia), he distils it into Ivan, an Marion Grace, ‘To the Editor,’ Era, 25 April 1885, p. 15. It is interesting to note that while Florence Wade played the female lead in both of

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her company’s productions of Ouida adaptations (Moths and Puck), the male leads were also performed by the same actor, Kyrle Bellew, who played both Corrèze and Carlos Merle. Bellew had also played Corrèze in Hamilton’s Moths for the majority of 1882. 63 W.F. Lyon, Moths, The Lord Chamberlain’s Collection (Add. MSS 53289 B.).

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honourable and hard working man whose life, and the lives of his family, have been ruined by Zouroff. Revenge was a popular motif of Victorian melodrama but the Moths adaptations show its multiple permutations: whereas Jeanne’s revenge is motivated by jealousy, Ivan’s is driven by a need for personal justice – a more forgivable and sympathetic reason to a Victorian audience. As Zouroff and Corrèze prepare to duel, Ivan reveals himself and shoots Zouroff dead. Justice has been served, the villain is dead, and the hero and heroine are united in their ‘unspotted’ morality and integrity. It was an ending which the audiences of Belfast Theatre Royal preferred to Hamilton’s (whose adaptation had played there eight months previously). Lyon was considered to have offered a ‘more consistent ending to the play’ in which ‘the fate of the Prince is an act of justice’.64 Possibly, however, Belfast audiences preferred Lyon’s ending because it surprised them in its outcome and possessed an originality in adaptation that Hamilton’s, in its ‘faithful’ rendering of the novel’s plot, lacked. Of course there was always the possibility of a rebellious reading not only in class terms – the virtuous working class takes revenge on a corrupt aristocrat – but in colonial: an oppressed Russian serf could stand for the colonized Irish. Such interpretative openness meant that Lyon’s adaptation continued to tour for another two years. Lyon himself would go on to star as Lord Estmere in another Ouida adaptation, H. Howell-Poole’s A Child of Chance (1886), adapted from Ouida’s Tricotrin. The range of dénouements across several adaptations of the same original reveal both the liberty and responsibility that adaptors felt, and the vulnerability of the novelist forced to submit to ‘bastardized’ forms of his or her own creation. The adaptations themselves signal the components of Ouida’s novel that were most popular by retaining them for transposition to the stage, but they also demonstrate that Ouida’s novel was too complex for one adaptor to encompass all aspects and elements within one four-act play. Instead, the adaptor would select a number of themes to explore through the central characters and the plotted action of the original novel. Hamilton’s adaptation of Moths and the dramatizations that immediately followed marked a turning point in popularity for novel dramatizations other than of those by Dickens and Scott, as well as a surge in popularity for adaptation of Ouida’s other works.65 In 1884 adaptations of Folle Farine (W. Avondale) and Under Two ‘Theatre Royal – “Moths”’, Belfast News-Letter, 22 May 1883, p. 5. In addition to the Moths adaptation discussed in this chapter there were others by

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M.A. Seaton (Liverpool, 1883), Mervyn Dallas (Strand, 1884), and two burlesques, Moths Quitoes; or, Ouida’s Moths by D.W. Edgar (Middlesbrough, 1882), and Moths à la Mode by F.H. Herbert (Edinburgh, 1883): see Appendix 3. Adaptations of novels by other writers in 1883 included Robert Buchanan’s God and the Man (adapted from his own novel of the same name) at the Adelphi, Lady Clare (adapted by Robert Buchanan from Georges Ohnet’s ‘Le Maitre De Forges’) at the Globe, East Lynne (Anon, from Mrs Henry Wood) at the Strand, Fate’s Decree (adapted by W.H. Williamson from Lord Lytton’s Paul Clifford) for the Sanger’s, The Millionaire (George William Godfrey’s adaptation of Kissing the Rod by Edmund Yates) at the Court, George Geith or a Romance of City Life (adapted by Wybert Reeve from Mrs J.H. Ridell) at Crystal Palace, and Jane Eyre (W.G. Wills’ adaptation of Charlotte Brontë) at the Globe.

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Flags (George Daventry) were both staged alongside new and revived adaptations of Moths; dramatizations of Favette, Puck, and Idalia followed in 1885.66 Ouida herself labelled adaptors as ‘clumsy pedlars in patchwork’,67 but perhaps Marie Litton’s claim that ‘adaptation is an art in itself’ merits further consideration.68 Success in the art of adaptation was dependent upon the dramatist’s ability to identify and translate the reasons for the original’s popularity into the adaptation while maintaining the conventions of the stage. The appropriation of this original is what confuses the reception and analysis of adaptations because when the curtain falls the question remains moot whom the audience applauds as the author of the work: the novelist or the adaptor. Whilst the original form was the creation of the novelist, the adaptation, though the work of the dramatist, turns on the same spirit and substance. This conundrum is perhaps best expressed by an incident from the opening night of Hamilton’s Moths at the Globe. When ‘well pleased with the play,’ the audience called for ‘principals and “author” at the end; with only one solitary “god” having the temerity to ask for Ouida when Mr Hamilton appeared.’69

Favette (adapted by John Tresahar from “Favette or Thargelie; or, My PastelPortrait by La Tour”, Bentley’s Miscellany, 51 [March 1862] 333–46) for the Vaudeville, Heartless (adapted by Marion Grace, later renamed Puck) for the Olympic, The Power of England (from Idalia, adapted by Charles E. Dering) for the Imperial. 67 ‘Dramatic Thefts’, Era, 11 March 1882, p. 4. 68 ‘Dramatic Thefts’, Era, 25 March 1882, p. 5. 69 ‘“Moths” at the Globe’, Era, 1 April 1882, p. 6. 66

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Fig. 5.1

Ariadnê (1877), cover, Chatto & Windus, 2 shilling yellowback, 1888

Chapter 5

Ouida, Vernon Lee and the Aesthetic Novel Sondeep Kandola

I In 1875, as part of her attempt to launch a career in European letters, the 19-year-old Vernon Lee began writing a series of unpaid articles on leading English, German and French women novelists for the upmarket Italian journal La Rivista Europea. She informed her mentor, the popular (but now forgotten) novelist, Henrietta Jenkin, that in preparation for it she was reading the novels of ‘the celebrated continental novelist from Bury St Edmunds, otherwise Louise de la Ramée, future Marchesa Lottaringo Lottaringhi della Stufa, as they say in Florence’. Just a fortnight later, Lee complained to Mrs Jenkin that she was already sick of her job as a critic as, even though she had read only four of Ouida’s ‘terrible romances’ so far, the thought of reading seven more ‘annihilated’ her.1 Despite Lee’s youthful disdain for both the fiction and personal life of her fellow Florentine, it is significant that nine years later the publication of her own roman à clef about the Aesthetic Movement in London, Miss Brown (1884) led Lee’s friend and critic W.C. Monkhouse to admonish her privately for writing a ‘very nasty’ novel about ‘beastly’ people and ask whether her intention had been to ‘rival Ouida’ (Gunn, p. 102). Monkhouse’s anxieties about the damage that Lee’s foray into popular fiction would apparently cause its author’s growing reputation as a cultural historian indicate that for him, at any rate, Ouida’s novels seemed to have exercised an unwholesome influence over the writing of what would prove to be a controversial, albeit commercially successful, first novel. That Monkhouse’s warnings about Lee’s novel were to prove accurate were borne out by the public and private accusations of fleshliness and prurience that greeted its publication that winter.2 Lee’s journal records the severe moral and professional crisis that she suffered as a result and how she spent the winter of 1884 agonizing over whether, in writing her exposé of contemporary high art, she had ‘mistaken the call of the beast for the call of God’. In particular, she was troubled by the thought that ‘at the bottom of this seemingly scientific, philanthropic, idealising, decidedly noble-looking nature of mine’ there might ‘lie something Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee, Violet Paget 1856–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 63–4. References to Gunn hereafter in the text. 2 See Vineta Colby’s account of the reception of the novel in Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 103–4, 107–8. References to Colby hereafter in the text. 1

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base, dangerous, [and] disgraceful that is cozening me’ (Gunn, pp. 105–6). For her part, Ouida, in writing to thank mutual friend Bella Duffy for sending her a copy of the novel, dismissed the outbreak of ‘goodie-goodie’ moralising that Miss Brown had induced in a review that she had seen in the Athenaeum and asked Duffy to bring Lee to tea the following week. Declaring that the novel both ‘interested’ and ‘amused’ her, Ouida claimed that in her personal experience, Lee’s ensemble of fictional characters was entirely feasible and that although ‘[t]he book gives … the impression of having been written at a galop [sic] … this is better than weeding and pruning till all the flavour is gone’ (Gunn, p. 103). Ouida’s sympathetic response to the younger writer was explicitly motivated by her perception of the parochialism of the English press. Given her praise of the veracity of Lee’s characters, it appears that Ouida was keen to claim implicit kinship between Miss Brown and her own brand of aesthetic novels. That Lee never availed herself of Ouida’s invitation to tea indicates that an association with the woman she had once privately described as ‘cette odieuse’ was not one that she was keen to pursue (Colby, p. 20).3 And yet somewhat unexpectedly in 1907, Lee seems to have come to some sense of rapprochement with her bête noire, as in this year Lee not only offered to send a nurse to attend the now ailing and impoverished novelist but also penned a generous account of her writing for the Westminster Gazette.4 Recent critical work on the constituency of Ouida’s audiences, her consolidation of the ‘aesthetic novel’ genre and responses to the artistic avant-garde by women writers like George Eliot and Vernon Lee herself has suggested ways in which we might reassess this intriguing encounter between popular fiction, high art and women’s writing at the end of the Victorian period.5 Notwithstanding the critical calumny implied by Monkhouse’s comparison of Miss Brown to a Ouida novel, I see striking thematic correspondences between Lee’s novel and Ouida’s 1877 novel about an Italian sculptress, Ariadnê: The Story of a Dream. Despite Lee’s avowed antipathy to Ouida, echoes of the plot of Ariadnê in Miss Brown are simply too tantalizing to ignore. In Ouida’s novel, the heroine Giojà is a beautiful orphaned half-Jewish Italian waif who comes to the attention, and is mentored by, a famous sculptor, Maryx, in contemporary Rome. To the narrator Crispin, an aesthetically minded old cobbler who finds the destitute girl wandering the streets, she is the living incarnation of what he believes to be a statue of the mythic Cretan princess. 3 By contrast, see Laurel Brake’s recent account of how Lee ‘strategically dedicated’ her early work to established writers such as Walter Pater and Henry James in order to ‘anchor and authenticat[e] herself in English letters’ in ‘Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle’, in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, eds Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 40–57, 40. 4 Vernon Lee, ‘About Ouida’, Westminster Gazette, 27 July 1907, p. 2. 5 See Talia Schaffer’s chapter ‘The Dandy in the House: Ouida and the Origin of the Aesthetic Novel’, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville and London, Virginia University Press, 2000), pp. 122–58 and ‘The Origins of the Aesthetic Novel: Ouida, Wilde, and the Popular Romance’, in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 212–29. References to Schaffer hereafter in the text.

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Similarly, Lee’s Anne Brown is also an orphan, this time of mixed Italian and Scottish parentage, who is ‘discovered’ by a celebrated Pre-Raphaelite artist, Walter Hamlin, working as a nursery nurse in Florence. Stunned by the nursemaid’s exotic beauty which he judges to be ‘neither Latin nor Greek but with something of a Jewish and … Ethiopian’ cast to it, the celebrated poet and painter pays for the girl to be educated in ‘Greek lyrism, Oriental mysticism, French æstheticism, but above all, things medieval and pseudo-medieval’ (Miss Brown, 1, p. 126) so that he might launch her in London as his muse and marry her, as the artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris had educated their working-class wives in real life. Hamlin envisions himself as a modern-day Pygmalion moulding his Galatea, Anne, and endowing her with the subjectivity that he presumes she lacks in order for her to understand him just enough to fall in love with him. Where Lee’s heroine is discomfited by the role of muse and Pre-Raphaelite icon that the London aesthetes ascribe her, by contrast not only is Giojà happy to model for Maryx but, under his direction, she also matures into a celebrated sculptress herself, and comes to supersede her former teacher in skill and reputation. However, this fame is dearly bought as she produces her finest work only after she falls in love with, is seduced and quickly abandoned by the aristocratic poet Hilarion. In the novel’s operatic climax, Hilarion only comes to understand Giojà’s selfless love for him and his own cruelty to her too late to be able to make amends to her before her untimely death. In both Ariadnê and Miss Brown, the two heroines ultimately surrender themselves to the will of their aristocratic artist lovers but to different effect. Although Giojà forfeits her reputation to become Hilarion’s mistress, it is nonetheless this decision to allow herself to experience and subsequently suffer for romantic love that inspires her to produce a supremely impassioned sculpture of Hilarion which not only seals her artistic reputation but also brings a much needed sense of self-knowledge to the poet. By contrast, Anne Brown decides to sacrifice her conscience and her noble philanthropic ambitions in order to marry Hamlin so that she might prevent him from sliding further into drunkenness and sexual immorality. Strong conceptual correspondences can also be adduced between the two texts. As argued below, both Ariadnê and Miss Brown offer an innovative articulation of a female subject position with regards to high art and also break new ground by twinning this to a working-class subjectivity. Moreover, that these two novels can be seen to actively reconfigure the Pygmalion myth, perhaps the most important mythic paradigm to govern the production of art in the Victorian period, also points to a commitment on the part of both writers to exploit the wider public arena that popular fiction afforded to give voice to women’s experience of high art as subjects, producers and consumers. In his reading of Ariadnê, Andrew King shows how questions of gender indeterminacy shape the fate of Ouida’s heroine: he argues that the sculptress can be simultaneously read as both the tragic mythic heroine Ariadnê and Bacchus, her divine male counterpart and rescuer.6 6 Andrew King, ‘Crafting the Woman Artist: Ouida and Ariadnê’, in Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, eds Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 207–25, esp. p. 214.

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Significantly, that Lee’s heroine Anne Brown is perceived by the narrator to be a ‘wom[an] without woman’s instincts and wants, sexless’ (Miss Brown, 2, p. 309) reveals the extent to which the two writers were not only interested in critiquing the sexual economy of contemporary high art, but also their shared sense of how the unconventional gender identities of their heroines had the potential to modify the sexual and social disparities that governed contemporary art and the world beyond. II When writing in opposition to the putatively masculine figure of the New Woman in 1894, Ouida was to extend an important caveat on the topical question of gender indeterminacy to ‘men and women of genius’. That she suggested that artists ‘belonged to a ‘third sex which is above the laws of the multitude’ but one that it is ‘always the foremost to recognize that it is the difference, and not the likeness, of sex which makes the charm of human life’ suggests a complex response on Ouida’s part both to her own role as a female artist and the gendered assumptions that continued to govern European art.7 By contrast to the special dispensation that Ouida afforded to the (Platonic) ideal of the third-sex artist, in Ariadnê her fictional sculptress is immediately beset with the sexual prejudices of her age as seen when a chorus of poor Roman hags repeatedly advise that she should turn to the stage or prostitution to support herself. Luckily, the girl is discovered by the kindly cobbler Crispin who, on seeing statuettes she has carved, decides to show one to his friend, the celebrated French neo-classical sculptor Maryx in the hope that, having seen her work, Maryx might tutor her and thereby allow the girl to earn a respectable living. However, even Crispin initially has doubts about whether the girl’s talent will amount to anything as he declares that ‘Marble costs gold, and sculpture is not for women. Sculpture is always an epic; and what woman has ever written one?’8 Maryx also deems artistic fame to be inimical to a woman’s peace and propriety and claims that if Giojà were to be a success she would find public renown to be both intrusive and onerous (Ariadnê, 1: 157). However, despite his pronouncements on what is best for a woman’s well-being, the force of Giojà’s untutored genius moves him to agree to be her teacher. Strikingly, the novel uses its characters’ discussion of whether modern art might ever achieve the elevated status of its forebears in the classical world as a platform from which to launch a critique of both the gender economy and the ethical constituency of contemporary high art. For Maryx, the only compensation for his belief that ‘no modern [artist] can be great’ lies in the quality of sympathy 7 Ouida, ‘The New Woman’, The North American Review, 158.450 (May 1894), 610–19, p. 617. 8 Ouida, Ariadnê: The Story of a Dream, 2 vols (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1877), 1, p. 46. References to Ariadnê hereafter in the text.

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which he judges to be the only original characteristic of contemporary art and which promises to ‘redeem an age of egotism’ by lifting the jaded modern out of ennui and excess (Ariadnê, 1, pp. 169, 215). Yet even the sculptor cannot resist the modern disease of solipsism. On showing Giojà his statue of Apollo for which he had used Hilarion as the model, Maryx blames its faulty execution on the cast of his own mind which he finds to be ‘too subjective’ (Ariadnê, 1, p. 175). And, as relations among the three artists develop, it becomes apparent that the novel not only envisions sympathy as having a gendered quality to it but as one that could not but be channelled in different ways by male and female artists. From the outset, Hilarion’s creed of impersonal sympathy is explicitly presented as both modish and misogynistic. Crispin recalls how he had first come across the poet as a ‘brilliant boy’ in Paris when he was carrying a dying mistress, writhing in agony, back to her opulent rooms. When the woman Lilas died, Crispin was shocked that this ‘base-souled, cynical-tongued youth’ appeared unmoved by the terrible death he had just witnessed. In explanation of such a pitiless attitude, Hilarion told Crispin that to him Lilas was no more than a ‘pretty cat’, and in his opinion, like most women she was inherently faithless. As Crispin remembers the scene, Hilarion’s unfeeling estimation of the female sex was quickly superseded by an apparently unconnected discourse that the boy launched upon on the subject of Shakespeare’s and (by extension, his own) poetic genius and, ironically, its relationship to sympathy. Crispin tells how the young Hilarion informed him, without any apparent sense of irony, that ‘Sympathy is the hall-mark of the poet’ and that ‘Genius should be wide as the heavens and deep as the sea in infinite comprehension’ (Ariadnê, 1, pp. 115–18). The cobbler’s warnings about Hilarion to Giojà prove cruelly apposite for, after seducing the sculptress and abandoning her, Hilarion uses their affair as material for the ‘cruel autopsies of a dead desire’ that he conducts in his poem Fauriel (Ariadnê, 2, p. 139). Significantly, Hilarion only transcends his modish creed of impersonality after he has killed Maryx in a duel and subsequently realized his cruelty before the dying Giojà. That the development from an impersonal to a personal sympathy is symbolically marked out by the poet’s presence at the death of two mistresses clearly underlines the misogyny and double standards that, for Ouida, underpinned the ‘voluptuous’ tenets of the contemporary avant-garde (Ariadnê, 2, p. 140). And yet, by drawing this implicit comparison between Giojà and ‘the dead butterfly’ Lilas, the novel appears to simultaneously confirm and contest Ouida’s pronouncements about the ‘third sex [artist] which is above the laws of the multitude’ (Ariadnê, 1, p. 115). Not only does the novel envision Giojà, the woman of genius, transcending the morality of her age but it also shows how she, as a fallen woman, is still predictably beholden to it. While Giojà is the subject of Hilarion’s poem Fauriel, he, in turn, is the subject of three sculptures: Maryx’s sculpture of him as Apollo, a clay sculpture that Giojà produces of him as ‘Love’ in Paris while still under the mistaken impression that he loves her, and finally, a statue of the poet that she sculpts after he has abandoned her. Maryx’s statue of Hilarion, more poète maudit than Olympian God,

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induces thoughts on the part of the sculptor about the impossibility of producing noble art in an overly self-reflexive modern age. Interestingly, however, Maryx overcomes his creative block when his growing love for Giojà inspires him to produce a statue of her as the virginal Nausicaa, a figure from the Odyssey loaded with implications of sexual awakening and marriage. In the cobbler’s opinion, because Maryx had produced ‘Nothing more delicately, seriously beautiful  … more purely Greek’ before it, this statue sees the sculptor finally ascend to the elevated status of classic statuary to which he has always aspired (Ariadnê, 1, p. 197). Yet on learning that Giojà and Hilarion have absconded together, a ‘wounded’ Maryx destroys the sculpture and later informs Crispin that the loss of his muse means that ‘I shall never be great any more’ because ‘the art in me is dead’ (Ariadnê, 2, pp. 102, 116). Provocatively, a similar erotic awakening also fuels Giojà’s artistic development. On showing Crispin her clay statue of Hilarion as ‘Love’, she informs the cobbler that it is the essential female experience of giving herself over to a heady and allconsuming love, as she finds other women before her have done, that has elevated her art. Later, after Hilarion’s desertion, Giojà sculpts another statue of him (The Poet) which Crispin judges to be an even greater triumph than its clay predecessor because it has attained the ‘spiritualised and perfect beauty’, the ‘vitality’ and ‘anatomical perfection’ of classical sculpture that ‘would have been great in Athens, and was how much greater in this modern age’ (Ariadnê, 2, p. 238). In making Hilarion a ‘divinity’, this second statue not only expresses the force of Giojà’s love for the poet but also, by depicting him holding a dead bird, adverts to the poet’s own ignoble tendency to sacrifice love and beauty for the dubious demands of society. Yet, ironically, for the abandoned sculptress, genius and artistic fame are nugatory since her only hope is that, on seeing the statue, Hilarion ‘will remember [her] a little’. In the final instance, as much as Giojà’s submission to a gendered stereotype of romantic love has the unlooked for effect of advancing her art, it is precisely this same compulsion which undermines her genius since, notwithstanding Crispin’s declaration of her greatness, she finds it no consolation for the loss of Hilarion. In this, her experience confirms both the mythological and real-life predictions of the grief in love that will always attend the gifted woman artist since according to Crispin and others, the ‘laurel growing out of [a woman’s] breast’ is ‘always … bitter’ (Ariadnê, 2, pp. 239–40). King, however, suggests that this final ‘biology is destiny’ pronouncement with which Ouida concludes the novel is strategically undercut by her use of the Ariadnê myth. For him, if Giojà’s acquiescence to the ‘mythic pulsion’ of the tale of Ariadnê’s abandonment and subsequent rescue by the god Bacchus not only appears to liberate the young sculptress from ‘the exclusively male artistic network she is part of’ but equally ‘gives her no liveable alternative’, the reality of Ouida as productive, popular and soon actively political author for the next several decades shows Ariadnê’s fate as indeed literary myth rather than reality (King, pp. 215, 221–2). Another significant, if, in the end, equally pessimistic mythic paradigm to shape Ouida’s novel is the tale of Pygmalion which, unlike the insurmountable

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‘pre-existent’ reality posited by Ouida’s use of the Ariadnê myth, is actively reconfigured in this text. The importance in Victorian art of the Ovidian story about the sculptor who sculpts, from his own imagination, the perfect woman to then have the sculpture brought to life by the goddess Venus, has been discussed by critics such as Gail Marshall and Essaka Joshua.9 For Marshall, in considering poems such as Arthur Hallam’s 1832 poem ‘Lines Spoken in the Character of Pygmalion’ and paintings such as Edward Burne-Jones’s series Pygmalion and the Image (1878), the unique significance of the ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ myth for male Victorian artists lay in its troping of male artistic mastery over female subjects. Importantly, Marshall reminds us that ‘in the Ovidian legend, the statue (who has only subsequently come to be known as Galatea) lacks both a name and a voice, because she is not born into conscious subjectivity … Her experiencing self is constrained by the circumstances of her creation, and she remains only and always the image of Pygmalion’s desire’ (Marshall, 18)

In terms of this second, if less explicit, mythic imperative, it is highly significant that Ouida’s novel opens with Crispin’s dream of the bronze bust of Ariadnê coming to life before she is joined in this metamorphosis by statues of various Olympian gods and mortals. Away from the gallery, Crispin often finds himself talking to the fauns, naiads and satyrs that he believes have ‘taken refuge’ in the fountains and ruined temples’ of the city (Ariadnê, 1, p. 21). Furthermore, he asserts his belief in the living quality of all sculpted marble because (in his words) ‘it is so much greater than any living thing ever was!’ (Ariadnê, 1, p. 99). Crispin’s enthusiasm for animate marble is offset by the figure of Maryx’s aged mother whose warning to Giojà not to ‘touch the stone’ reverses the lines of the Pygmalion story since she claims that contact with the stone can only but petrify human beings: ‘It will turn you into its own likeness, or else kill you, making you think a stone a human thing’ (Ariadnê, 1, p. 183). Like the mythic Pygmalion’s conscious sculpting of his desire in the Galatea statue, Maryx moulds his desire for the living girl into his statue of her as Nausicaa, a sculpture which he destroys when she establishes her autonomy and, more importantly, enacts her desires by leaving with Hilarion. Giojà’s assertion of her difference from Maryx’s statue thus effects an important recalibration of the Pygmalion myth by overturning the tradition, as identified by Marshall, of denying subjectivity and a voice to Galatea. In Ariadnê, Ouida not only actively reconfigures the mythic story of Pygmalion and Galatea in order to ascribe the female subject a consciousness, autonomy and articulacy, but also inventively remodels high art’s governing myth to figure a woman artist as the principle agent of its ethical renovation. As both sculptor and model, Giojà, in her figurative doubling as both the silent stone Nausicaa and the Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Essaka Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). References to Marshall hereafter in the text. 9

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desiring sculptress, represents a composite of Pygmalion and Galatea. Unlike the Pygmalion myth, while Giojà’s sculpture of Hilarion is still an idealization of her desire it is, however, one inflected with an essentially sympathetic understanding of the character of the subject. Importantly the sculptress’s desire does not obviate Hilarion’s subjectivity but rather the statue she produces and the message it conveys promise something of an ethical redirection of modern art as the poet is not only brought to a fuller realization of himself but also his preconceptions about female inconstancy and creed of poetic impersonality are revealed as anathema to him. The ethical regeneration of modern art also sees Giojà acquire something of a class consciousness as a result of her abandonment by the aristocrat Hilarion which sees her redeploy her inheritance from her miserly Jewish grandfather to aid Rome’s poor. Moreover, Ouida’s proletarian narrator Crispin also briefly recounts how he had abandoned his early active commitment to a revolutionary republicanism in favour of devoting himself to appreciating Rome’s civic art. Strikingly, this subduing of Crispin’s early republicanism by art would appear to suggest an attempt on Ouida’s part to participate in what Linda Dowling has described as the development of the (British) ‘aesthetic democracy’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dowling envisions the development of the aesthetic democracy, in texts from Shaftesbury’s Characteristics to the criticism of Oscar Wilde, as a sustained endorsement of the individuality and freedom of the artist and a contemporaneous emphasis on how the aesthetic responses of the individual viewer had the power to effect social reform. For Dowling the dual march towards the democratisation of aesthetic sensibility and the evolution of the aesthetic into the agent of social reform is most memorably instantiated in John Ruskin’s celebrated appraisal in The Stones of Venice of the conciliatory politics he perceived embodied in the city’s medieval architecture. That Ruskin’s vision of how Gothic architecture conveyed not only ‘the promise of a sociality lived completely free from the competitive individualism and degrading power of markets’ but also ‘upheld the individuality [and] freedom … of the ordinary citizen’ appeared to indicate to his Victorian readers the socially transformative (if essentially conservative) power of art.10 For her part, by briefly adverting to Crispin’s former life as the proletarian revolutionary Rufo Quintilio and his continued love of art, Ouida radically draws attention not only to the way in which, even in recent memory, the sacrifices of ordinary people underpinned the maintenance of the important cultural heritage of Rome but also, and perhaps more importantly, their democratic right to lay claim to it. Indeed, we might even find echoes of Ruskin’s express instructions to his British readers to ‘go forth to gaze upon the old (Gothic) cathedral front’ in Crispin’s first direct address to the reader (‘Go you, traveller, and see it where it [the Ariadnê statue] stands’) (Ariadnê, 1, p 8).11 Equally, shades of the evocative architectural vitalism of Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art, The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 35. 11 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, The Complete Works of John Ruskin (Library Edition), eds E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), 10, p. 193. 10

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The Stones of Venice might also be adduced from Crispin’s fanciful belief that the fountains of Rome are peopled with naiads and satyrs, a position which the cobbler roundly defends by declaring that ‘if it be nonsense to you, be sure to you Rome is dead, and you walk over its stones, blindfold and deaf.’ (Ariadnê, 1, p. 24) Strikingly, with the publication of Ariadnê, it would thus appear that the ideals of the ‘aesthetic democracy’ had infiltrated as far as the genre of popular fiction.12 This point was seemingly confirmed two years later when the Saturday Review explicitly identified Ariadnê as one of the many public interventions that its author, much to the outrage of the Italian people, continued to make about the new nation’s apparent mismanagement of its classical heritage.13 As much as Ouida’s novel is an attempt to intervene on the question of the ethics of modern art, Giojà and Crispin’s experiences serve to remind her readers of the reality of the recent republican struggles on which the preservation of Rome’s classical legacy depended. Indeed, both Crispin’s revolutionary past and Ouida’s own widely reported interventions in Italian public life suggest that Ariadnê might be placed in a corpus of nineteenth-century texts by women writers such as Madame de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows (1851) that sought to intervene in the political life of Italy. The growing scholarly interest both in popular fiction and Victorian Britain’s enthusiasm for the Italian struggle for independence witnessed of late suggests that a timely reversal of Ouida’s marked occlusion from this tradition might soon be effected.14 III Like Ariadnê before it, Miss Brown offered an impassioned critique of what Vernon Lee, too, found to be the gender inequalities that shaped the production of contemporary high art.15 Set in the aesthetic salons of contemporary London, the novel was inspired by Lee’s experiences of meeting literary personalities such as William Morris and Oscar Wilde on her regular summer trips to the city to make publishing contacts and directs its particular antipathy towards the Pre-Raphaelite movement and its followers. In letters home to her mother, Lee declared the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti ‘coarse and repulsive’, complained that his brother’s ‘aesthetic house’ in Hammersmith was ‘filthy’ and ‘dingy’ and judged 12 In turn, both Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites admired Ouida’s work (Schaffer, p. 124; see also pp. 2, 4, 24, 49–50 above and p. 171 below. 13 The Saturday Review, 6 September 1879, pp. 291–2. 14 The relative disregard in which Ouida has been held is evidenced, for example, in the fact that no mention of her was made in the 2003 collection Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, eds Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003). 15 Also see my discussion of Lee’s growing dissatisfaction with the aesthetic movement and, more particularly, her articulation of it in Miss Brown in my monograph Vernon Lee (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2010), pp. 8–37.

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the neo-medieval attire sported by rich female adherents of the movement to be ‘insane’ and ‘shabby’ (Gunn, p. 88).16 In terms of the novel’s characterization, Walter Hamlin’s mania for all things medieval, the ‘morbidly imaginative’ poetry he writes and the ‘perfectly unintelligible mystery’ of his paintings are clearly intended to recall Rossetti who had died two years previously. As suggested by Christa Zorn, at the time of the publication of Lee’s novel Rossetti was once again in the public eye because of the posthumous publication of his collected letters (Miss Brown, 2, pp. 89, 57).17 Vineta Colby points out that the fictional Anne Brown’s statuesque appearance, her crinkled brown hair, her working-class background and the education that her lover provides for her suggest that Lee modelled her heroine on William Morris’s wife, Jane (Colby, pp. 106–7). Moreover, like Ariadnê before it, in its eponymous heroine Lee’s novel not only twins the female subject position to a working-class subjectivity but also, as seen in the character of Ouida’s narrator Crispin, similarly explores the relation between high art and radical politics. And yet, perhaps the most striking correspondence between the two novels is the way in which Miss Brown also reconfigures the Pygmalion myth to explore, in this instance, the anomalies marking the purportedly radical sexual politics of 1880s aestheticism. Tellingly, from the outset, Lee’s fictional Pre-Raphaelite artist is only interested in Anne Brown’s ‘superb physical appearance’. Not only is Hamlin indifferent to ‘the intellectual or moral’ side of her character but he also wilfully conceives of her as an exotic sculpture: to him she appears to be ‘no living creature, but some sort of strange statue … a beautiful and sombre idol of the heathen’ (Miss Brown, 1, pp. 50, 24–5). He later explicitly invokes the ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ myth when considering the iconic role which he will bestow upon Anne in London who ‘should live for the world and for fame’ while his life will be ‘crowned by gradually endowing with vitality, and then wooing, awakening the love of this beautiful Galatea whose soul he had moulded, even as Pygmalion had moulded the limbs of the image which he had made to live and to love (Miss Brown, 1, pp. 121–2). Hamlin believes that by directing Anne’s education in all things aesthetic, he will accord her a mind where he nonchalantly assumes that she does not have one and will, thereby, help her to understand his work and, by extension, reciprocate his romantic feelings for her. Initially at school, Anne’s inexperience means that ‘she did not always understand exactly … the mysterious temptations of unspeakable things, beckoning his nobler nature into the mud’ which Hamlin alludes to in his poetry and letters to her. She sees instead ‘only the beauty, the vague passionate wistfulness, the delicate sadness of what he wrote’ (Miss Brown, 1, pp. 224, 226). However, her actual experience of living amongst London’s ‘strange eclectic’ Pre-Raphaelite society sees her mature out of her once girlish ‘adoration’ of the 16 Vernon Lee, Vernon Lee’s Letters, ed. Cooper Willis (London: Privately printed, 1937), 1, pp. 87, 70. 17 Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History & the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. 111.

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poet and, instead of passively reflecting this Victorian Pygmalion’s desire back to him, she becomes so distressed by the ‘improper’ and ‘impure’ works produced by him and his circle that she embarks upon reforming this ‘famous club’ (Miss Brown, 1, pp. 226, 223, 2, pp. 87, 34). Where the career of Ouida’s heroine as both artist and model potentially suggested an ethical renovation of modern art and the gendered conventions that underpinned it, similarly, in Lee’s novel, Anne, an articulate Galatea, seeks, but ultimately fails, to exert a new moral influence over Hamlin and his school. Believing in what she considers to be Hamlin’s essential gentlemanliness, Anne persuades him to try and ‘revolutionize’ poetry by forgoing the usual ‘mysterious evil passions’ of his school in favour of a ‘return to nature’ as subject-matter (Miss Brown, 2, pp. 71–2). To Anne’s relief, a jaded Hamlin uses a holiday away from ‘the clique-and-shop shoddy æstheticism with which he now associated’ to write a long poem, ‘The Ballad of the Fens’ (Miss Brown, 1, p. 7). The poem has a Romantic pastoral setting and, instead of the ‘voluptuousness’ and ‘saturnine’ tenets of aesthetic poetry, celebrates sanguine domestic pleasures and married love. As a result it is overwhelmingly rejected by his group whose ‘postures’ of immorality appear to have so poisoned their view of the world that they judge the poem’s vision of domestic contentment to be ‘beastly’ (Miss Brown, 2, pp. 72, 75). To Anne’s disappointment, in direct response to the group’s distaste for the ballad, Hamlin petulantly tears up the poem and abandons this new mood of artistic earnestness. The ‘odious’ influence of his fellow aesthetic poets triumphs as Hamlin then chooses to exploit Anne’s real-life anxieties about the morally corrupted condition into which poverty has reduced his tenants as poetic material and, rather than helping them as a mortified Anne suggests, rewrites the ‘Ballad of the Fens’ as a disturbing naturalist poem (Miss Brown, 2, p. 244). Moreover, despite the challenges to sexual convention enshrined in PreRaphaelite art, as evinced, for example, in Rossetti’s Jenny sonnet sequence (1870), Lee indicates in Miss Brown that the gender politics of this high art movement did not offer a strong intervention against the continued social and sexual disparities that continued to shape late-nineteenth century culture. Where Ouida had shown in Ariadnê both how Hilarion’s artistic practice was founded on an inherent misogyny and the evolution of Giojà’s genius depended on her refusal to bow to the narrow sexual conventions of the day, Lee similarly reveals that, as liberal and as progressive in attitude as these Aesthetes perceive themselves to be, in reality their behaviour was as beholden as mainstream society to the values that they seek to overturn. This is seen where, in a fit of temper, Hamlin causes Anne’s friend Marjorie and her fiancé to separate briefly by deliberately and deceitfully accusing her of flirting with another man. Additionally, through Anne’s relationship with her cousin, the radical politician Richard Brown, the novel also articulates Lee’s political pessimism with regards to the attitudes that socialists adopted towards women. Anne plans to become a governess in order to escape her life as a nursery-nurse, a plan which distresses Hamlin for what he judges to be the ‘common modern radicalism’ that this plan shows him in her

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character (Miss Brown, 1, p. 92). While, as suggested earlier in Ariadnê, Crispin’s love of Rome and its civic art are expressive of the nineteenth-century ideals of ‘the aesthetic democracy’, in Miss Brown the negative response of Hamlin and his set to the (Ruskinian) potential of the working classes to actively appreciate and be ennobled by art signals a clear resistance to such ideas.18 In Florence, Anne’s employer Mr. Perry casually dismisses the working classes’ capacity for intelligent thought by observing that material want means that this class ‘often have very little character – at least none in particular developed’ because ‘after all it’s talking and jawing about things which don’t matter a pin that develops our character’. Similarly, Richard Brown and Hamlin immediately feel an inherent dislike for each other based on the mutual antipathy of the working-class reformer for the ‘idler’ and, in turn, the aristocrat for the ‘ugly’ representative of ‘the aggressive working classes’ (Miss Brown, 1, pp. 63, 171). At first, Richard Brown seems to offer Anne a liveable alternative to aesthetic life as the cousins discuss serious subjects together such as political economy and social reform. And yet, as the novel unfolds, we see how, in Lee’s assessment, radical reformers are as guilty as the Aesthetes of being unable to countenance either vocations for women or any capacity for autonomous thought on their part. Anne hopes that she might escape Hamlin and his world and share in her cousin’s projects, an idea that he encourages. But much to her dismay and revulsion, it transpires that his interest in her is motivated by his sexual attraction to her. Anne is disappointed to find that ‘Richard Brown loved her, wanted her’ and that ‘the sympathy, the comradeship, the quiet brotherly and sisterly affection [between them] had all been a sham for her and for himself’ (Miss Brown, 3, pp. 75–6). Comparable to the ‘biology is destiny’ pronouncement that concludes Ariadnê, Anne Brown’s realization that her cousin’s interest in her is determined by his sexual attraction to her powerfully articulates Lee’s sense that whatever form a woman’s vocational ambitions and aspirations might take, her role in society is governed principally by a reductive biological essentialism.19 Strikingly, the critique of heterosexual marriage offered in Lee’s novel is also consolidated in Hamlin’s response to the enigmatically masculine cast of Anne’s beauty. Like the opening of Ouida’s novel in which Crispin muses over whether the bronze statue he sees in Rome’s Caesars’ Gallery is either a representation of Ariadnê or Bacchus, the frame of gender indeterminacy also shapes the fate of Lee’s heroine.20 Notwithstanding Lee’s critique of what she essentially believed 18 Hamlin actively articulates his rejection of Ruskin and William Morris’s promotion of an aesthetic education for ‘noble workmen’ by roundly declaring it all to be ‘democratic bosh’ (Miss Brown, 2, p. 29). 19 Lee was to develop further her ideas on the reductive biological and sexual imperative that governed women’s lives in her review essay of Charlotte Perkins (Gilman) Stetson’s Women and Economics for the North American Review in 1899 (reprinted as ‘The Economic Parasitism of Women’ in Gospels of Anarchy and Other Contemporary Studies [London and Leipzig: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908] 261–99). 20 Cf King ‘Crafting’, pp. 212–4.

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to be the double standards and pretentiousness of high art and its practitioners simultaneously, the celebration of unconventional female beauty in Pre-Raphaelite art seems to have indicated to her that, hypothetically, high art carried within its artistic lexis the possibility of liberating women from the traditional gender stereotypes to which they were forced to conform. Hamlin is attracted by the masculinity of Anne’s beauty. His first vision of her offers a multifaceted encoding of both Aesthetic tropes and something curiously he has never seen before: The forehead was high and narrow, the nose massive, heavy, with a slight droop that reminded Hamlin of the head of Antinous [the boy lover of the Emperor Hadrian]; … He wondered as he looked at her; and wondered whether this strange type, neither Latin nor Greek, but with something of Jewish and something of Ethiopian subdued into a statuesque but most un-Hellenic beauty, had met him before … and as he looked at the girl, it seemed, despite its strangeness, as if, at some dim distant time, he had seen and known it well before (Miss Brown, 1, p. 25)

Here, it is significant that, for Hamlin, Anne’s ‘monumental’ and boyish beauty can only be understood in terms of both a sexual and racial alterity as even the sexual indeterminacy implied by the Antinous comparison does not remain fixed but, as seen in Hamlin pondering of Anne’s ‘Jewish’, ‘Ethiopian’, and ‘unHellenic’ appearance, is one that is quickly overwhelmed (‘subdued’) by figures of racial difference. Moreover, Anne’s appearance even appears to contest historical epistemes as Hamlin not only sees in it a new archetype of female beauty but also simultaneously finds it to be eternally iconic. Hamlin’s artistic ‘othering’ of Anne prepares the reader for a remarkable direct address on Lee’s part in which she overtly campaigns for a model of femininity that is even more controversial than that propounded in Pre-Raphaelite art. In an extended passage in volume 2 of the novel (pp. 307–9), Lee appears to permit herself a rare moment of unguarded speculation on the ways in which (Anne’s) sexual difference might be channelled to induce a form of radical social change. Here, Lee reflects on what her heroine might crucially achieve in wider society if she accepts that being true to her essential nature necessitates a rejection of marriage and motherhood on her part. Thus, Lee positively envisions her heroine as a woman ‘without woman’s instincts and wants, sexless … made not for man but for humankind’ and conceives of this alternative femininity as potentially the source of seismic social change. In this energetic address, Lee offers a new model of female identity which champions what society refuses to allow women, a vocation, and contests what it expects of them, marriage and motherhood. For Lee, Anne’s potential embracing of her essential difference from other women promises to transform her into a modern-day ‘Joan […] of Arc’ with momentous powers with which to reinvigorate society (Miss Brown, 2, pp. 308–9). Extraordinarily, we see Lee redeploy the traditional gender stereotypes that emphasized woman’s moral superiority over men, which were propounded by Victorian feminists and their critics alike, in order to speculate on how Anne’s recognition of her alternative

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gender identity would make an exceptional heroine out of her. The insistent and passionate manner in which Lee directly addresses the reader would appear to relay something of an epiphany that she, herself, had had about the future. Martha Vicinus’s recent suggestion that Lee constructed an alternative gender identity for Anne Brown as a ‘superior third sex’ proves particularly germane in adducing further connections between Miss Brown and Ariadnê.21 As seen in King’s reading of Ariadnê, Ouida had signalled through Giojà’s doubling as both Ariadnê and Bacchus that gender indeterminacy potentially promised a liberating, if ultimately unliveable, identity for the female artist. Yet that Ouida would later use the figure of the Platonic third-sex artist to argue against the New Woman suggests a decidedly conservative application of the third-sex category to obviate real-life, as opposed to mythic, examples of sexual difference. By contrast for Lee, Anne’s putative masculinity is an identity that she must evolve out of before she can ascend to the status of third-sex humanitarian and reform a world of ‘injustice … callousness, and evil’ (Miss Brown, 2, p. 308). In Ariadnê and Miss Brown, not only do both authors variously deploy the genre of the aesthetic novel to debate the gendered conventions under which women were forced to live but equally seemed to use the fate of their heroines to undertake some special pleading for their own decisions to reject these over-determined female roles for themselves. IV The unacknowledged impact of Ouida’s novel on Lee appears to have made itself felt again in Lee’s 1903 romance Ariadne in Mantua. In this cross-dressing romance inspired by Twelfth Night, Lee, like Ouida before her, not only uses the Ariadnê myth to explore female artistry from a class perspective but also importantly frames her vision of her Renaissance singer heroine in an extra-textual network of contemporary women artists. Lee’s Renaissance heroine Magdalen is a low-born courtesan who, in transvestite disguise as the singer Diego, is employed by a cardinal of Mantua to sing his nephew, the ruling duke, out of the deep depression and a distaste for women that has come upon him as a result of being held hostage by pirates for many years. It is revealed that Magdalen is the Duke’s former lover and that she had been instrumental in his rescue, a self-sacrificing act of love which, again adverting to the Ariadnê myth, the duke has had memorialized in a mosaic of a maze on his bedroom ceiling. The vertiginous gender play of Lee’s romance climaxes with ‘Diego’s’ performance at the Duke’s wedding celebrations where, dressed as the mythic Ariadnê, Magdalen’s performance culminates with her suicide off-stage. As with Ouida’s sculptress heroine, Magdalen’s supreme artistry is a result of her lowly class position where her genius has evolved as a direct response to class 21 Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women (2004) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 156; emphasis in original.

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division and material want. Yet Magdalen’s story is more politically contentious than that of Ouida’s proletarian heroine as Lee explicitly presents Diego’s suicide as a provocatively self-assertive gesture on the part of the working-class artist before a gathered audience of aristocrats. For Lee, Diego ‘must needs assert himself, violently wrench at their heart-strings, give them a final stab, hand them over to endless remorse; briefly, commit that public and theatrical deed of suicide, splashing the murderous waters into the eyes of well-behaved wedding guests’.22 Moreover, Ouida’s dedication of her novel to a real-life practising artist, the sculptress Ada Colonna, is also significantly mirrored in Lee’s own framing of her romance about a woman artist in a personal network of her female friends and artists: the composer Dame Ethel Smyth and her former lover, the poet Mary Robinson (Madame Emile Duclaux). Thus, with Ouida and Lee drawing attention to female sexual difference as potentially the source of dynamic social change, we see both the popular and highbrow writer deploy the medium of high art as a platform from which to analyse the gender economy of contemporary (European) society. And although Miss Brown had once been perceived to have damaged Lee’s growing reputation as a serious high-art writer by inadvertently aligning her writing with Ouida’s fiction, it is significant, as exemplified in Ariadne in Mantua, that Lee would continue to rework the themes that dominated Ouida’s 1877 novel (Italy, art, thwarted love, myth, vengeance, gender indeterminacy and class) across her imaginative writing into the twentieth century.23 In the final instance, how might we then conceptualize the lasting, if unacknowledged, impact of Ouida’s Ariadnê on Lee? The most compelling answer hitherto appears to present itself in Harold Bloom’s famous theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’. Fascinatingly, for Bloom the ‘strong’ poet’s unconscious imbibing of the work of his precursor in order to transcend it and make ‘his’ literary reputation is a process accompanied by a powerful sense of creative disquiet.24 Might not the ‘anxiety of influence’ in part explain not only Lee’s youthful disdain for Ouida’s writing at precisely the moment when she was launching her own professional career with La Rivista but also the echoes of the plot of Ariadnê in Miss Brown and Ariadne in Mantua and, more generally, Lee’s conflicted personal response to Ouida? Whether the cultural historian’s ambivalence to her fellow Florentine might be diagnosed as an acute case of the ‘anxiety of influence’ or not, what is certain, however, is that this encounter between Ouida and Lee affords a powerfully arresting insight into that interplay of myth, Italy, high art and popular fiction that came to radically redraw notions of female artistry in the closing decades of the Victorian period. Vernon Lee, ‘Preface’, Ariadne in Mantua: A Romance in Five Acts (Portland, Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1903), xi 23 Here, see tales by Lee such as ‘Amour Dure’, ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ and ‘A Wedding Chest’ in the collection of Lee’s gothic tales by Maxwell and Pulham. 24 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 5. 22

Fig. 6.1

‘“Ouida.” Punch’s Fancy Portraits no 45, Punch, 20 August 1881, p. 83

Chapter 6

Defending Female Genius: The Unlikely Cultural Alignment of Marie Corelli and Ouida Nickianne Moody1

Ouida and Marie Corelli are at first glance easily comparable: both had long careers as popular and independent women writers responsible for earning their living during a period of cultural anxiety about such status, both were frequently viewed by their contemporaries as unpleasant personalities greatly concerned with their own self-importance, both were associated with impossible romance and pretentious and erratic learning. They even shared the same publishers at different times. Twentieth-century critics later connected them through their anti-suffrage stance and their powerful negative portrayals of New Women. While neither writer can be reclaimed or reconstructed by present-day scholars as feminist in any simple way, recent critical discussions acknowledge the complexity of their attitudes to changing gender roles at the end of the nineteenth century.2 Nonetheless, Ouida and Corelli appear irrevocably divided by their attitudes to morality and sexuality, the one risqué when not outré and the other conservative when not prudish. Corelli in that sense makes a curious advocate for Ouida. Yet Corelli persistently sought identification as Ouida’s champion. She first approached Ouida in 1883 with a proposal to publish a selection of excerpts from Ouida’s writings, through ‘a sincere desire to do the genius of the author full justice’.3 Corelli was at that time unknown to Ouida and her proposal was 1 I should like to tender especial thanks to Jane Jordan and Andrew King for their help with this article, providing information about Ouida that would not otherwise have been easily available to me. 2 Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late Victorian Literary Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000) and Pamela K. Gilbert, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See, for example, Federico’s close reading of Corelli’s novella My Wonderful Wife (1889) which she describes as ‘A clever story that reveals Corelli’s contradictions on several levels: she exposes male vanity and defends traditional gender roles and at the same time engages in a sustained argument against New Women and a polemic for women’s equality’ (p. 110). 3 New York Public Library, Ouida Correspondence with Chatto & Windus, Contessa Marie Corelli to Ouida, 5 January 1883.

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turned down; Chatto & Windus subsequently issued their own volume containing excerpts from Ouida’s writings that same year, edited by the Revd. F. Sidney Morris, Wisdom, Wit and Pathos. In April 1890 Corelli published ‘A Word about “Ouida”’ in Belgravia, the iconic illustrated shilling monthly devoted to light literature started by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in 1867. In 1894, Corelli paid Ouida a visit in Florence, claiming to be a countess. In 1907 just months before Ouida’s death and to Ouida’s furious shame, she wrote that though Ouida had suffered from malign criticism ‘frequently and unjustly passed upon a woman novelist far more brilliantly endowed than most of her contemporaries’, ‘public admiration for her undoubted genius which must be felt by all independent readers of fiction’ would prevail to set up a fund to relieve Ouida’s financial distress.4 Corelli thereby catapulted Ouida against her will into the headlines of the popular press and frontpage photography. Vernon Lee followed suit, writing of Ouida that ‘she gave us in our plastic days something which we have handed on, not in books merely, but in letters, in conversation, in intellectual attitude and gesture.’5 Although direct relations between Ouida and Corelli will be explored in this essay, it is the 1890 essay which allows the best insight into how both women sought to manage the contradictions and tensions in their influence with regard to the numbers of readers that they reached, and in the status as cultural reference points that their writing and mediated ‘personalities’ achieved. In an attempt to resolve these tensions, the idea of ‘genius’ became key for both. The Belgravia essay, although early acknowledging that it is unable to defend Ouida’s system of morality, argues primarily that Ouida’s oeuvre overall should be recognized as ‘exquisite, delicate and scholarly to a degree unsurpassed by any modern male or female writer of today’s fiction’.6 In order to support Ouida’s work in response to criticism predicated on the literary establishment’s attitude toward woman writers (which Corelli felt had also impacted on her own career), it contrasts Ouida’s work with popular novels written by men, distinguishing between ‘the beautiful fact’ of In Maremma (1882) and the ‘ghastly fancy’ of Rider Haggard’s She (1887) (p. 367). In so doing it enters the realism and romance debates of the 1880s, referencing Andrew Lang’s famous essay of 1887 in which he had valorized his friend Haggard’s romance, and Ouida’s own stated relation to ‘realism’ in her early contribution to the debate where, unexpectedly, she had aligned herself to a hybrid non-prudish (Zola-esque) realism combined with idealism which, with hindsight, we can understand as a kind of heightened realism with roots in sensation.7 This hybrid representational practice of realism-sensation-romance and indeed the tenor of its argument are consonant with the essay’s publication in Belgravia. The article can be read as an example of the self-consciousness and self-reflexivity 4 Marie Corelli, ‘Ouida: An Appeal to Her Readers’, Daily Mail, 13 July 1907, p. 7 and see King above, pp. 33–4. 5 Vernon Lee, ‘About Ouida’, Westminster Gazette, 27 July 1907, p. 2. 6 Marie Corelli, ‘A Word About “Ouida,”’ Belgravia: A London Magazine, April 1890, 362–71, p. 367. References to this are henceforth given in the text. 7 Ouida, ‘Romance and Realism’, letter to The Times, 12 October 1882, p. 3–4.

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so common in the nineteenth-century periodical press, for not only had Ouida published several stories in the magazine but the essay itself picks up themes from Braddon’s editorial in Belgravia right at the start of its publication in 1867. Braddon had set out a defence of light fiction while describing and justifying the periodical’s programme. Belgravia targeted a respectable middle-class readership which aspired to literary taste and judgement while simultaneously demanding entertainment – and which, crucially, included women, for Belgravia ran fiction by women and was run by a woman. There was, however, a growing critical discourse around light literature which portrayed such work, and Braddon’s in particular, as addictive agents of moral corruption and as sources of intellectual enfeeblement for women readers. To defend and promote the consumption of her work, Braddon needed to reconfigure such negative images of women readers and their vulnerability to fiction, and reposition them as engaged in a profitable and instructive pastime.8 The heart of her argument was that sensation fiction had been treated unjustly by social and literary commentators.9 She presented the case that its readers were able to make their own critical judgements and that sensation fiction was artistic and relevant to the contribution women made to family life. Ultimately, sensation as it appeared in Belgravia ‘was defined as a legitimate force for education and reform that could make the public more aware of social problems that might otherwise be hidden or ignored’.10 In its address, essays and fiction, Belgravia configured an alternative representation of the female reader and argued that realism was the legitimate appeal of the sensation novel to its discerning reading public. Neither Corelli nor Ouida are routinely considered sensation authors, but both had written or were writing novels which could be identified as addressing similar issues to those featured in sensation fiction.11 Braddon, like Corelli and Ouida, used the privilege of her popular status to gain access to publication, and to campaign ‘against contemporary critical practices that she disliked and for an alternative less venomous and more inclusive form of literary criticism.’12 All three writers maintained that literary critics were inadequate for evaluating the type of fiction that they published, which held definite aesthetic merit and, in Corelli and Braddon’s case, a feminine one. Braddon, however, at least in some cases, understood the price of popularity when she presented her fiction to her readers as having a ‘primary purpose to amuse and 8 Jennifer Phegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 2004), p. 22. 9 Phegley, Educating, p. 129. 10 Phegley, Educating, p. 152. 11 That both are associated with sensation is indicated by the chapters devoted to them in A Companion to Sensation Fictioni, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): Jane Jordan, ‘Ouida’, pp. 220–31; and R. Brendan Kershner, ‘Corelli’s Religious Trilogy: Barrabas, The Sorrows of Satan and The Master-Christian’, pp. 591–602. 12 Solveig C. Robinson, ‘Editing Belgravia: M.E. Braddon’s Defense of “Light Literature”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 28.2 (Summer 1995), 109–22, p. 109.

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entertain’13 whereas Corelli had a greater interest in literary recognition. Corelli wanted literary criticism not only to appreciate that Ouida had produced ‘a more thrilling, nobly-drawn word picture of storm, distress and terror’ (p. 367) than any other novelist of the period but also to recognize that this effect was due to the aesthetic of romance which critics despised. Above all, Corelli emphasized Ouida’s ‘genius’: ‘when all is said and done, the fact remains, that “Ouida” is a woman of genius. Not Talent, merely, but Genius’ (p. 362). Such claims to female genius constituted a significant departure from the main tenets of the light fiction debate in the 1860s. As a mark of distinction between high and low culture, the term had so long been established by the time of Braddon’s launch of Belgravia that it could be used ironically by critics of mass culture. In a review of Lady Audley’s Secret for the Northern British Review in 1865 the derisive comment that ‘[I]f the test of genius were success, we should rank Miss Braddon very high in the list of our great novelists. … By the unthinking crowd she is regarding [sic] as a woman of genius’,14 is an assertion of the foolishness of the mass that works to distance the popular female novelist from the conception of the real genius. As a defensive strategy by popular women writers, however, the claim to genius had inherent risks beyond counter charges of pretention and foolishness. Both writers were very much aware that their social comment and observation could be dismissed as evidence of women’s lack of competence to participate in the public sphere or, in a more extreme form, as a kind of madness associated with women and, more particularly, unmarried women. In public debate genius could be construed as a misfortune which prevented women from achieving their proper role and status within the home. Particularly troublesome was the belief that genius provided disturbing and brutal revelations into what lies outside the values of conventional social systems. Corelli chose to acknowledge this latter perspective, demonstrating in her essay that she was willing to overlook lapses in moral judgement in favour of the force of Ouida’s inspiration. Penny Boumelha’s article on the woman of genius as she appears in New Woman representations of artists looks specifically at the ideology which women writers sought to appropriate and to disclaim. She finds that the ‘independent heroine as writer’ is a strikingly frequent occurrence in New Woman fiction but one that, in its construction, falls back on traditional feminine values because ‘the successful woman writer must, by definition, be compromised’.15 Corelli, by using fantasy, is able to find a way out of the impasse whereby authentic works of artistic merit must necessarily be commercial failures. She was, of course, writing for a popular market, but Felski reminds us that ‘the politics of escapist forms is more complex than many critics have allowed, in that their negotiation of the everyday may hold Robinson, ‘Editing,’ p. 112. Cited in Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian

13 14

Sensationalism (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 16. 15 Penny Boumelha, ‘The Woman of Genius and the Woman of Grub Street: Figures of the Female Writer in British Fin de Siècle Fiction’, ELT, 40.2 (1997), 164–80, p. 164, p. 177.

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a powerful appeal for disenfranchised groups’,16 as is the case here for women. Inherent in the phrase ‘a woman of genius’, both for Corelli and the New Woman novelist, is the possibility of female artistic creativity and intellectual power. Corelli also needed to challenge the implications of genius in the late nineteenth-century. The broader cultural debate set out by Galton (1869) in Hereditary Genius qualified the desirability of genius. His work had by the 1890s reached a much wider public especially after the publication of a second edition in 1892, Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) the translation of Lombroso’s (1891) The Man of Genius which compounded the view of genius as a pathological condition. In scientific discourse genius was allied with types of insanity that, always exceptional, were especially so in women. The nature of genius that Corelli attributes to Ouida in her 1890 essay is therefore set out in a very careful manner. Genius is predominantly defined in contrast to talent; Corelli makes this distinction immediately after providing the context of a prejudiced male literary establishment. Penelope Murray suggests that Longinus’ classical account of poetic experience was often cited in popular debate: sublimity defined as a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse is the hallmark of the greatest poets and prose writers, who can overwhelm us, sometimes in a single phrase, with the lightening force of their emotions, transporting us in spite of ourselves into the realms of inspired imagination.17

Corelli recalls this passage in her attribution of genius to Ouida: ‘[G]enius, genius – not mere talent – is in this woman. And it is my habit to honour Genius, as a lightningmessage from the gods, wherever and however it flashes across my path’ (p. 364) – unlike male authors and critics who are ‘ungallantly jealous of a woman’s brain that proves in any respect sharper, quicker and more subtle than his own’ (p  363). Classical accounts of poetic inspiration often suggested that the gift of genius led to frenzy, a conclusion which had to be carefully negotiated in Corelli’s account of female genius. Lombroso had described genius as a degenerative psychosis which explained why it should be understood as a weakness and indication of lack rather than health.18 An established means to dispute this understanding was to exemplify genius in Shakespeare, a favourite for Corelli, as a positive instance of genius. Corelli chooses to quote Ouida’s writing about Shakespeare as an example of her insight (p. 365), thereby configuring her genius as comprehension and the ability to understand the world intuitively rather than through learning. While Corelli’s argument is structured around the envy commonly directed towards genius, she also has to address the belief that genius serves to disturb society through its insight and rejection of established thought. The question arises, Rita Felski, Gender of Modernity (London: Harvard University Press, 1995),

16

p. 121.

17 Genius the History of an Idea, ed. Penelope Murray (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 17. 18 Galton argues this as well in the preface to the second edition of Hereditary Genius [1869] (1892).

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then, whether those in possession of genius should be judged by different standards to those who follow the conventional rules of society. Corelli’s acknowledgement of Ouida’s genius follows such speculation: ‘[r]ecognizing as I do, with respect, the force of her inspiration, it is a matter of both wonder and regret to me that her brilliant pen has so often been used for the depicting of social enormities and moral sores, but while deploring the fact I still assert […]’ (p. 364). Corelli finds that she cannot moderate her admiration on the grounds of the immoral nature of Ouida’s characters and continues with her demand for justice. Corelli then goes on to discuss ‘Umiltà’ as evidence for Ouida’s genius – an interesting choice on several grounds. ‘Umiltà’ was a short story from Ouida’s collection, Pipistrello and Other Stories, published by Chatto & Windus in June 1880, the majority of whose stories had appeared in Belgravia. Following the logic of internal promotion whereby one part of a periodical refers to another, it may be that Corelli thought that ‘Umiltà’ was one of these. It was, however, an exception, having been published in the Christmas 1879 issue of the Whitehall Review, another publication with which Ouida had a long association.19 Its heroine is in complete contrast with Corelli’s protagonists, who are rarely able to integrate themselves into the domestic sphere or maternity. Corelli, nonetheless, refers to the short story as ‘quite perfect of its kind’ and ‘a mere village incident raised to the dignity of a poem by the matchless way in which it is treated’ (p. 367). She also finds it difficult to believe that ‘Umiltà’ and Moths, of which she disapproves, were written by the same person. This ability to write in different ways again she interprets as a mark of genius which is ‘wilful, often exceedingly irritating in its capricious changes of humour, and never exactly what the world would have it be’ (pp. 367–8). ‘Umiltà’, Corelli supposes, was written in ‘the happiest hours’ (p. 368) of Ouida’s imagination. The protagonist, Umiltà, is beautiful as a ‘Titian picture’ but subject to public censure and gossip. Why we are uncertain. A part of her picturesque appeal during her introduction is that she is depicted with a child, like a renaissance Madonna, but whether she is married or not is unclear. All we know at the beginning is that she is ostracised and that ‘she was a foundling and has been in prison’.20 The narrative, a Bildungsroman in miniature, follows her childhood and growth into a woman. For her courtship, when it comes, the hero, Virginio, has to prove his love for her by accepting her as she is and waiting for her. His role in the narrative thus reverses standard gendered behaviour in the romance or domestic novel. Rather than the romance genre’s focus on the heterosexual couple, the formation of Umiltà’s relationship with Virginio’s mother and the actions of her rival are equally significant. Moreover, most of the emotional engagement is concentrated on the Bildung of the heroine through self-knowledge: the story concludes not A French translation, ‘Umiltà; Esquisse de Moeurs Toscanes’, appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 December 1879, pp. 881–913, and the next month her American publisher, Lippincott, published the story in Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, 25 (January 1880), 38–58. 20 Ouida, ‘Umiltà’, Pipistrello and Other Stories (Adamant Media Corporation, 2006 [reprint of 1910 Tauchnitz]), p. 150. 19

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with marriage (we have to assume it happens offstage, if it happens at all) but with the heroine’s ability to serenely withstand social disapproval. The very end of the story shows her blissful with her child. Janice Radway argues that the romance narrative is concerned with ‘the imaginative transformation of masculinity to conform with female standards’21 which in turn assists in the construction of a female self appropriate to patriarchal parenting arrangements. She disputes criticism of the romance which views it as masochistic and rooted in the desire to obliterate the self, proposing instead that the desire motivating the genre is an imaginary relationship which results in ‘the erasure of boundaries and loss of singular consciousness achieved through union with an individual indistinguishable from the self’.22 In ‘Umiltà’ Ouida achieves the image of ‘that original, blissful symbiotic union between mother and child that is the goal of all romances despite their apparent preoccupation with heterosexual love and marriage.’23 This Corelli is able to recognize as a creative achievement, explaining that she is also interested in the subject matter of a woman surviving injustice. Corelli is furthermore impressed by Ouida’s sheer skill: in the case of ‘Umiltà’, it is manifest in a restrained and simple style. Elsewhere Corelli lauds Ouida’s ‘assertions’ which she views as removed from ‘faltering feminine weakness’ and ‘as ruthless, as witty, as any sayings of Rochefoucauld. A Man might have written them – ye gods! Think of it – the Nobler Creature might have penned such lines and smiled complacently at his own cleverness’ (p. 368). Talia Schaffer has likewise emphasized Ouida’s development of the epigram to articulate her discontent with modern morals and values. It was indeed a rhetorical practice for which Ouida had been celebrated and which had been promoted in Chatto’s 1884 collection, Wisdom, Wit and Pathos.24 Although Corelli is clear that Ouida’s command of her craft does not entirely redeem the morality of her narrative, she is determined that Ouida’s artistic qualities be recognized as holding parity with male intellectual achievement. Photography and Genius If Corelli uses the concept of the genius to rescue Ouida, for Ouida herself it was also a strategic term, though used in a very different way. In the essay ‘O Beati Insipientes!’, for example, she characterizes genius as ‘the ultimate union of pride and humility’ which cannot be understood by the mediocre and inferior. 25 Corelli’s 1890 essay shows genius working in ignorance of the ‘hornet swarm’ about its head, the ‘viper brood’ coiling around its ankles and ‘the horde of stinging, prying, Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 147. 22 Radway, Reading, p. 155. 23 Radway, Reading, p. 156. 24 Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 127. 25 Ouida, ‘O Beati Insipientes!’, Views and Opinions (1895) (Charleston, South Carolina: BiblioLife, 2009), p. 30. For more on Ouida’s strategic use of the term, see King, ‘Sympathetic Individualist’ and ‘Crafting’. 21

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buzzing, poisoning insects which will thicken the air as it passes and hide in the heart of the roses it gathers’.26 For both writers, genius has to contend against envy which will distort the art that it produces, and undermine the confidence and public stature of the artist. In several periodical articles gathered together in Views and Opinions (1895), Ouida writes at length about her abhorrence of modern technology’s contribution to ‘various forms of public inquiry and personal interference’27 which intrude upon genius, especially ‘the intolerable Kodak’.28 Both Corelli and Ouida resisted photographs and interviews29 and Federico analyses several photographs used in publicity for Corelli including an unauthorized paparazzi shot printed on the front cover of The Sketch for 12 December 1905. The image is captioned ‘A photograph of a lady who will not be photographed: A snapshot of Miss Marie Corelli leaving her cab at the Portland Rooms to attend the Shakespearean Bazaar’. Ouida permitted just two photographic portraits to be circulated during her lifetime: until the late 1880s, the sole image known to readers was a profile taken by Adolphe Beau at his studio in Regent Street which dates from her residency at the Langham Hotel (1867–71).30 The portrait is peculiarly unrevealing: an expressive eye countered by a firmly masculine nose and chin; the only interesting feature of the composition is the fact that Ouida, defying convention, wears her long hair undressed, flowing freely over her shoulders. It was this photograph which furnished various other images of Ouida in the popular press during the 1870s and 1880s, the most famous being Linley Sambourne’s 1881 cartoon produced for Punch, which forms the frontispiece for this chapter: cigarette in hand – an allusion to her most famous heroine, Cigarette in Under Two Flags – the author is seen blowing smoke rings. A few years earlier the photograph had been used to advertize Cope’s Tobacco: in a double-page advertisement in the February 1876 issue of Cope’s Tobacco Plant, Ouida is the sole woman to be featured in the company of such eminent smokers as Cardinal Manning, Gladstone and Liszt. Ouida firmly denied that she ever smoked, but the common perception that she did says a great deal about popular conceptions of women writers.31 Ouida allowed her American publisher, Corelli, ‘Ouida’, p. 20. Ouida, Views and Opinions (General Books, LLC Publication (2009) [1895]),

26 27

p. 199.

Ouida, Views and Opinions, p. 34. See Teresa Ransom, The Mysterious Miss Corelli, Queen of the Victorian Bestsellers

28 29

(Sutton: Stroud, 1999), p. 146. 30 Carte de Visite signed by Ouida in Jordan private collection. Cf Figure 1.1 above. Larger copies of this photograph could be obtained from the London Stereoscopic Co. (‘Photographers to the Royal Family’) which also had offices in Regent Street (Jordan private collection). As late as 1895, Ouida preferred to use the Beau portrait for publicity (see Jane Jordan, ‘Ouida: The Enigma of a Literary Identity’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 57 [Autumn 1995], 75–105, p. 81). 31 Ouida denied that she had ever smoked in the short article, ‘Apropos of a Dinner’, commissioned by Wilde for Woman’s World (March 1888), 193–4, p. 193.

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J.B. Lippincott, to reproduce an etching of Beau’s photograph for his edition of Signa (1875); the romanticized pencil sketch executed by her Florentine friend Alice Danyell, published in the Whitehall Review (5 October 1878), also derives from Beau (it is plainly not a study from life); as late as 1898, Chatto & Windus used the same profile of a youthful (albeit prettified) Ouida to grace the front cover of their sixpenny paperback edition of Under Two Flags. On her brief return to London 1886–87, Ouida sat for a second photographic portrait at the prestigious Baker Street studio of Elliott & Fry: now in her late 40s, Ouida’s hair is tied back in a chignon, and she faces the viewer full on, her head resting contemplatively on one hand. It was appropriated by the tobacco firm of Ogden’s for one of their series of cigarette cards advertising ‘Ogden’s Guinea Gold Cigarettes’;32 the Daily Mirror was to reproduce it on its front page announcing Ouida’s death.33 Previously, of course, she had been furious at the appearance of photographs claiming to be of her in the Daily Mail. 34 Federico, seeking to explain Corelli’s aversion to press photography in words that could well apply to Ouida suggests that ‘[P]ublishing images was both a commodification of the woman writer and a form of discipline in a culture where women had to have bodies as well as books’.35 Corelli sought fame but attempted to manage her public persona very carefully. Ouida, writing at a distance, also kept her opinions in the public domain through letter writing, essays and other engagements with the press but avoided interviews. She frequently contested erroneous speculations about her identity by means of letters to The Times (reports that she had become a Catholic convert, and that she was suffering from a ‘mental malady’, to take two examples). She threatened to sue Henry Labouchere, editor of World, for remarks about her personal appearance (Labouchere made a public apology). The ‘wholly imaginary’ portraits which appeared in the American Press gave her particular annoyance.36 Yet Ouida was not tempted to write her autobiography, and dismissed one would-be biographer with the statement: ‘My works are there for all to read. With me individually they have nothing to do’.37 34 35

See Figures I.1 and 2.1 for these two portraits. Daily Mirror, 27 January 1908, p. 1. See above, p. 33–5. Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late Victorian Literary Culture (London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 31. 36 See Ouida’s letters to the Editor of The Times, 6 December 1883, p. 7, and 6 August 1883, p. 4. With reference to the unkind remarks about her personal appearance in World, one paper observed that Ouida’s protest ‘has led only to the production of a great deal of “comic copy” in the shape of letters, and some very vigorous denunciations of her books  ... Miss De la Ramée rather likes to have her books called wicked; it sells them. But she objects to the personal descriptions’, ‘Our London Correspondence’, Liverpool Mercury, 2 September 1880, p. 5. Ouida’s reference to the ‘wholly imaginary’ portraits of her which were periodically printed in the American press was made to an unidentified American recipient, 17 April 1895, George Frisbie Hoar Autograph Collection, bMS AM 1622, 56, Harvard University. 37 Ouida to unidentified recipient, 28 April [n.d.], Princeton University, Parrish collection, Ouida Correspondence, Miscellaneous I. See above, p. 33 for Ouida’s 1907 correspondence with Montgomery Carmichael and her refusal to write her autobiography. 32 33

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Federico concludes that in resisting unauthorized images, Corelli fought against the correlation that could be made in the manner of Galtung, Lombroso and Bertillon between criminal behaviour and physiognomy. As a literary woman she was in constant danger of being perceived as deviant or unsexed, and this could be ‘fortified by photographs’ which moreover ‘could be used as cultural weapons to mock her pretensions to both sexual prettiness and literary brilliance’.38 As such she continued to defend herself against the discourse of male critics whose literary judgements were, she felt, prejudiced and unable to acknowledge the female artist. In this Ouida and Corelli seem united. Contrast and Context Following the publication of the Belgravia essay, Corelli and Ouida maintained a correspondence during the 1890s which led to the meeting in Florence in March 1894 after an invitation responding to a letter of condolence that Ouida received from Corelli after her mother’s death. However, it is the professional not personal nature of this correspondence which is important to emphasize, for Corelli in 1894 introduced Ouida to Methuen with whom Ouida published Views and Opinions (1895). In one letter, during a gossipy roundup of new books and literary activities, Ouida asked Corelli whether she had read The Silver Domino (1892), an anonymously published set of satirical episodes that lampooned contemporary writers, the publishing industry, public figures and the press. She explained, ‘that vol. delighted me so much. I cannot help saying that the personalities permitted in the English press are disgraceful’.39 Corelli had by the time of this letter admitted privately to her publisher, who was greatly offended by its content, that she was part-author of the volume.40 Whether Corelli replied to Ouida with an acknowledgment of her involvement is not known. The Silver Domino, or Side Whispers, Social and Literary purports to be the personal and amusing critique of fashionable society made by a masked social observer. Parodying political and literary figures as well as modern manners, it is written in a variety of styles, some of which are similar to the polemical speeches found in Corelli’s fiction. Ouida is included in a discussion entitled ‘Of Writers in Grooves’ in direct connection with Braddon, Broughton and Corelli herself. Criticism is directed in this section at ‘the “groovy” men, who, as soon as they find one particular sort of “style” that chances to hit the taste of the public, keep on grinding away at it with the remorselessness of an Italian street-organ-player’.41 In contrast, Corelli is presented as a writer whom critics find ‘exasperating’ because she declines to settle into a groove and therefore remains ‘a trial … to the always Federico, Idol, p. 38. Eileen Bigland, Marie Corelli, the Woman and the Legend: A Biography (London:

38 39

Jarrolds, 1953), p. 149. 40 Ransom, The Mysterious Miss Corelli, p. 72. 41 Marie Corelli, The Silver Domino, Or, Side Whispers, Social and Literary (1984) (London: Lumley, 2009), p. 34.

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sage reviewer’.42 Ouida, however, unlike the figure of Corelli’s Belgravia essay, is criticized for lacking different styles and using recurring characters which prevent her from achieving a ‘convincing portrait of life’.43 Nevertheless, Ouida is still attributed genius (if misspent) and a talent for tales narrated with ‘a gorgeousness of colour and picturesque description that is not only brilliant, but very marvellously poetical’.44 Braddon and Broughton are likewise castigated for their use of formula and stock scenes and characters, even though for Corelli such ‘grooviness’ is a predominantly male tendency – and one which the critics prefer because it saves them the time from having to deal with originality. At the time of The Silver Domino, Corelli and Ouida were at very different stages of their personal and professional lives. After the initial and unexpected commercial success of Corelli’s first novels for Bentley, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) and Vendetta (1886), she was able to write and sell her fiction without editorial interference. However, literary success eluded her. She had expected critical acclaim for Wormwood (1890) since she had taken on the themes of French naturalism and exposed the horrors of absinthe addiction. The first edition sold out in ten days, but its very popularity did it no favours with the critics; her preface for the eighth edition published in 1893 despaired at ‘the ephemeral opinion of a few ill-paid journalists’ and declared that ‘the public itself is the supreme critic now’.45 The rupture with Bentley caused by The Silver Domino meant that she had sought a new publisher in the time just prior to meeting Ouida. Barabbas (1893), her first direct foray into the Biblical epic, and The Sorrows of Satan (1895), her most successful novel (arguably the first nineteenth-century bestseller in the strict definition), were published by Methuen – the latter in the same year that Methuen brought out Ouida’s first collection of essays. Corelli was constrained by her own poor health and the financial demands of her older half-brother Eric Mackay. Between 1895 and 1897, she wrote five novels which Ransom argues were necessary to support Mackay and the two households.46 These included The Murder of Delicia (1896) in which the heroine is worked to death while the profits go to her unworthy husband. Corelli is direct and vituperative regarding the treatment of women artists and, more significantly, their lack of economic independence, stating in a later introduction to the book: whatever woman does that is higher and more ambitious than the mere act of flinging herself down at the feet of a man and allowing him to walk over her, makes her in man’s opinion unworthy of his consideration as a woman; and he fits the appellation of ‘unsexed’ to her with easy callousness, which is unmanly as it is despicable.47

44 45 46 47 42 43

Corelli, The Silver Domino, p. 40. Corelli, The Silver Domino, p. 39. Corelli, The Silver Domino, p. 39. Ransom, The Mysterious Miss Corelli, p. 60. Ransom, Corelli, pp. 89–90. Marie Corelli, The Murder of Delicia (London: Constable 1907), p. ix.

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Ouida had covered the same ground with Tricotrin (1869) and Folle-Farine (1871), which consider the selfishness of the male artist. After Mackay’s death in 1898, Corelli moved out of London to the security of a new independent life in Stratford-upon-Avon. Ouida had also used essays to voice her criticism of the church, literary, scientific and political establishment, as Lyn Pykett points out in this collection. She was still able to market her fiction, but her inability or refusal to manage money resulted in a series of evictions. However, while Ouida’s output of successful new narrative writing had come to an end in the mid-1890s, the resonance of her earlier fiction continues until the 1920s, especially in the way that her novels were dramatized for the cinema.48 Ouida’s journalism and essays were more erudite and widely circulated that the few pamphlets and articles produced by Corelli, but the latter’s opinion reached a wider audience because she used her fiction and her public speaking to address a broader public. If Corelli and Ouida are grouped together as popular writers, it is usually their antipathy to the New Woman which forms the connection and remainders them as anti-suffragists. At the same time their practices seem to contest their assertions, as observed by many critics. Federico notes the apparent contradiction of Corelli’s unequivocal belief in a woman’s right to economic and artistic independence which would move her to support Ouida in the 1890s but which belies her antifeminism. Federico argues that Corelli’s opposition to the New Woman and the suffragist was based on her perception that their actions were a form of ‘romancing masculinity’.49 However, Corelli claimed justice for the feminine qualities of Ouida’s writing, the originality and passion found in the ‘rush, fire and beauty of language’ (p. 367) which prompted her defence of genius. Corelli’s essay on Ouida drew praise from the novelist John Strange Winter (the pseudonym of Henrietta V. Stannard), who wrote personally to Corelli, congratulating her ‘on the exceptionally brilliant article … Everything you say about Ouida is so perfectly just … such courage deserves the admiration of our whole fraternity’.50 Ouida herself thanked Corelli for her ‘courageous article’.51 Yet she recognized a very different dichotomy than that which preoccupied Corelli. For Ouida, it was not a hierarchical conflict based upon sexual difference (male critic versus female novelist), but a cultural conflict between the insularity of essentially middle-class English critics and cosmopolitan, if not foreign, literature. It was this dichotomy which, for Ouida, removed her from the category of women writers and, by implication, writing of the second rank. Countering Corelli’s view that she See Alexis Weedon, ‘From Three-Deckers to Film Rights: A Turn in British Publishing Strategies, 1870–1930’, Book History, 2.1 (1999), 188–206. 49 Federico, Idol, p. 103; see also p. 95. 50 Reprinted in Eileen Bigland, Marie Corelli: The Woman and the Legend (London: Jarrold’s Publishers, 1953), p. 118. Like Ouida’s before her, Winter’s early career was associated with military fiction, her most famous work being Bootle’s Baby: A Story of the Scarlet Lancers (1885). 51 Ouida to Marie Corelli, 4 April 1890, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, DR 777/55. 48

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had been discriminated against exclusively on the grounds of her sex, Ouida made clear her conviction that she suffered from the prejudices of specifically bourgeois reviewers: ‘The attitude of men towards my works of which you speak is only observed in a certain class of Englishmen. A very different verdict is passed on them by men of other nations … and by Englishmen who are cosmopolitan and unprejudiced’.52 If in both her private correspondence with her publishers and her published articles on contemporary literature, Ouida expresses her contempt for ‘the very low standard of criticism which prevails in England’,53 yet nowhere do we find a single complaint about the gendered discrimination suffered by women writers. The Pall Mall Gazette made short shrift of Corelli’s article (‘A more fitting title would have been “The Worship of Ouida: by a worshipper”’),54 and later attempts to defend Ouida were critiqued in a like manner. Corelli’s ‘A Word About Ouida’ was followed by George Slythe Street’s ‘An Appreciation of Ouida’ in the Yellow Book (July 1895). Street, taking up a rather different position to Corelli, modestly calls himself a ‘superfluous champion’; the Saturday Review agreed with him, arguing that since Ouida’s romances continued to fill the railway bookstalls ‘in profusion’, Street’s critical re-appraisal was redundant.55 Yet, Street, like Corelli, sought to defend Ouida’s critical reputation, asking why she was ‘placed, in the general estimation of critics, below writers without a tenth of her ability’, and her novels treated with cynicism or, at best, ‘a frankly contemptuous patronage’.56 Two years later, Street’s friend Max Beerbohm penned an appreciation of Ouida for the Saturday Review (3 July 1897), which was reprinted in a collection of essays he dedicated to Ouida, More (1899).57 Such articles did not go unnoticed. Ouida to Marie Corelli, 4 April 1890. Ouida, ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’, p. 214. For example, in writing to

52 53

Andrew Chatto about reviews of her 1878 novel Friendship, she advised him, ‘I am sorry you take to heart any criticism – I am so used to the slanderous pettiness of the English press that I never think about it’; ‘remember all my reputation has been made in the teeth of [their] snarling jealousies & calumnies’, Ouida to Chatto & Windus, 5 July 1878 and 11 July 1878. 54 Pall Mall Gazette, 7 April 1890, p. 6. 55 G.S. Street, ‘An Appreciation of Ouida’, Yellow Book, 6 (July 1895), 167–76, p. 167. The essay was reprinted the following year in Street’s collection of writings, Quales Ego (London: John Lane, 1896). The Saturday Review reviewed Street’s article on 14 August 1895, p. 4, and then issued a longer piece by Alice Meynell about Ouida’s reputation (in response to a letter of complaint from Street), ‘The Wares of Autolycus: The Praises of Ouida’, 16 August 1895, p. 4. 56 Street, ‘An Appreciation’, p. 176, p. 167. 57 J.G. Riewald refers to the essay on Ouida as ‘a kind of rehabilitation’, Sir Max Beerbohm: Man and Writer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1953), p. 82. Robert Viscusi further intimates that Beerbohm looked on Ouida’s reputation as ‘his own protectorate’, Max Beerbohm, or the Dandy Dante: Re-reading with Mirrors (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 101. Beerbohm declined to write a review of Ouida’s The Waters of Edera (1900), telling her publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, that he admired ‘Ouida’s work as a whole so much that I should not like to write of any part of that work in any vein but in a vein of enthusiasm’, Max Beerbohm to T. Fisher Unwin, 23 March 1900, Berg Collection, NYPL.

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The Athenaeum, for one, scoffed at the ‘recent affectation of irresponsible criticism [which speaks] of Ouida as a genuine and perversely judged artist’.58 In July 1896 Ouida was approached by G.B. Burgin of the Idler, a monthly magazine edited by Jerome K. Jerome, asking whether she would contribute to an article entitled, ‘How Women Writers Work’. Ouida refused to cooperate with Burgin in part because of what she called the ‘offensive and injurious libel’ against her in an earlier edition of the journal.59 At the time, neither Jerome nor Chatto, the magazine’s publisher, answered her letters of protest. Whether Ouida was personally sensitive to criticism is to miss the point (interestingly, she regarded Eliza Lynn Linton’s sensitivity to reviews a great weakness):60 the quickness with which Ouida responded to slights upon her demonstrates how carefully she guarded her reputation and her public name. Ouida’s refusal to cooperate with the Idler in fact owed more to her outright rejection of the categorization of writers by sex, taking issue with Burgin’s supposition that the writing process was necessarily different for men and women. Ouida made clear her unwillingness to be identified as a woman writer: As regard your question I do not very well know what it means. What possible way can there be of composing except when one has something to say to write it? Also, I object to the expression ‘Women Writers’. There is no division of writers except into good and bad; the former being very few. There is no sex in true talent.61

The piece proposed by Burgin in fact served as an adjunct to his earlier article, ‘How Authors Work’, which confined its discussion exclusively to male writers (a mixture of Idler regulars and more prominent authors like Conan Doyle, Haggard, Gissing and Grant Allen).62 It was Burgin’s claim that he only thought to interview women writers in order to propitiate an indignant female reader ‘who wanted to know what I meant by “leaving out the ladies! Weren’t they Authors?” she enquired Rev. of Ouida, Critical Studies, Athenaeum, 22 September 1900, p. 377. Ouida to G.B. Burgin, 6 July [1896], Ouida Files, Miscellaneous II, Parrish

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Collection Princeton University. In January 1895, the Idler had taken objection to the fact that Ouida was regularly commissioned to write articles on the political situation in Italy for a ‘respectable journal’, in this case Frank Harris’s Fortnightly Review (between 1892–94, Harris commissioned ten essays from Ouida). Six months later, she came in for renewed attack on the publication of her first collection of essays, Views and Opinions: again she was castigated for her ‘wild mis-statements’ about Italian politics, and her knowledge of the Italian language derided (W.L. Alden, ‘The Book Hunter’, Idler, June 1895, p. 720). 60 Ouida confided to a mutual friend, Mrs Shirley Brooks, that ‘Mrs Lynn Linton minds “criticism” so called, i.e. the antagonism of more or less successful writers’, Wolff Uncat., 2 July 1876, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 61 Ouida to G.B. Burgin, 6 July [1896]. 62 G.B. Burgin, ‘How Authors Work’, Idler, April 1896, 344–8.

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with a capital A.’ By placing the origin of his piece on women writers in an act designed placate an emotional woman rather than in rational arguments around justice or science, Burgin was able to reinforce the question of sexual difference and feminine inferiority.63 Anne Humpherys has recently discussed the effect of Jerome’s editorial decision to commission the work of increasing numbers of women writers and illustrators upon the magazine’s implied male readership and ‘masculinist agenda’.64 Humpherys contends that although prominent New Woman novelists appear to have compromised their principles when writing for the Idler, the fact that Jerome felt compelled to acknowledge and court women writers did have significant consequences: the tone of the magazine changes, as does the expectation of the reader. This may be so. There are some fascinating anomalies, such as the magazine’s stated impatience with Ouida’s outmoded ideas about modern womanhood, as expressed in her essays ‘Female Suffrage’ and ‘The New Woman’, in which she espouses essentialist notions of sexual difference: ‘It is sad to see that, in Ouida’s opinion … the New Woman is frightfully objectionable; and that all women, whether new or old, are fit for nothing of any consequence’.65 But Burgin’s initial assumption that the only novelists of note were men accords with Gaye Tuchman’s classification of this period of increasing professionalisation in the closing decades of the nineteenth century as a time of ‘redefinition’, during which men of letters actively redefined the qualities of the great author and the great novel as indisputably male.66 The chief difference between Burgin’s two articles is the way in which his male and female interviewees choose to represent themselves to the reading public. Burgin’s women writers assert their essentially amateur status. For most, the hours of composition are subject to domestic and or social interruption. There is an insistent disavowal of any active role in the creative process; repeatedly we hear that novels write themselves. As noted by Lyn Pykett, when ‘applied to women writers, “professionalism” was invariably a denigratory term’: ‘They were women first, and writers second’.67 In contrast, Burgin’s male authors, while maintaining a degree of ironic detachment appropriate to the magazine’s editorial stance, assert their professionalism. To a man, they are able to supply information about their working day (to the nearest half hour) and how much G.B. Burgin, ‘How Women Writers Work’, Idler, September 1896, 204–12, 204. Corelli was apparently not asked to contribute, despite writing stories for the Idler, such as ‘An Old Bundle’ (March 1895); the journal had also commissioned a lengthy article from Corelli, ‘“Barrabas”—and After’ (September 1894). 64 Anne Humpherys, ‘Putting Women in the Boat in The Idler (1892–28) and TO-DAY (1893–97)’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1 (2005), 1–22, p. 12. 65 W.L. Alden, ‘The Book Hunter’, p. 719. 66 Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 8. 67 Lyn Pykett, The Improper Feminine: The Woman’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 202. 63

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writing they’re able to produce (to the nearest 500 words). Burgin’s most overused adjective in this piece is the word ‘industrious’, a term never applied in ‘How Women Writers Work’. The Popular Genius The romantic idea of the injured, isolated genius despised by the mob that Corelli and Ouida inherited and manipulated for their own purposes is of course at odds with the very real numbers of people who consumed their works. Oscar Wilde’s admiration of Corelli (albeit brief) and of Ouida offers an indication of their ability to appeal to both mass and culturally élite audiences. Multiple editions, different forms and locations of publication (including translations) demonstrate that their fiction had the capacity to reach new audiences by remaining open to interpretation, identification and reading pleasure. If we are to attribute ‘genius’ to them today, it is surely through their ability to speak to vast and diverse audiences. The cultural alignment that Ouida and Corelli share – although their opinions, social experience and writing styles differ – is their interest in specific points of cultural tension and a willingness to enter into popular debate. Both Ouida and Corelli eschew traditional preoccupations of the domestic found in women’s writing. Corelli is not a writer of romantic fiction; indeed, her novels tend to displace courtship and idealize the intellectual and artistic spinster – positive versions of Ouida’s writer-heroine in Friendship. Her female protagonists seek and acquire self-knowledge, by refining an aesthetic sensibility and securing spiritual forms of independence. Ouida is more interested in the disintegration of marriage through the machinations of anti-heroines and the self-centredness of parodic masculinity. Corelli notes Ouida’s ‘wicked, but exquisitely lovely ladies … stupid girls who are just sixteen’ and ‘bold, bad men’68 but her own anti- or ambivalent heroines are just as intriguing, open to speculation, outrageous and enjoyable.69 Corelli may chastise Ouida for her cynicism particularly in the way that ‘characters of good women should, as a rule, be foolish, and come to a miserably undeserved end, while her characters of courtesans and cocottes would nearly always be triumphant’ (p. 364) but she is also concerned with the limited power of women within gender stratified society. Both writers, commercially successful with society novels during the 1880s, met consistent criticism from reviewers of their attempts to recreate the world of high society to which they did not belong and of which they were therefore presumed ignorant. This perceived lack of cultural and social capital resulted in perceived inaccuracies, misassumptions and faux pas. In a late Victorian version of the ‘Old Corruption’ trope from the 1840s, their stories revealed their middle-class origins – and its assertion – through the narratives’ desire to expose dishonourable standards Corelli, The Silver Domino, p. 39. See Nickianne Moody, ‘Moral Uncertainty and the Afterlife: Explaining the

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Popularity of Marie Corelli’s Early Novels’, Women’s Writing, 13.2 (June 2006), 188–205.

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of behaviour in aristocratic sexual behaviour. Typical responses to their work would be to declare that the women produced fiction for the servants’ hall which knew how to appeal to a mass market eager to criticize their betters.70 Reviewers also regarded the very idea that Ouida and Corelli took themselves seriously as artists as a further subject of ridicule. Ouida’s defence of the romance genre, ‘Romance and Realism’, was regarded at the time as little more than ‘an amusing letter to The Times on the ever-charming theme of her own surpassing genius’.71 J.G. Cawelti famously made the case that popular fiction is commercially successful when it allows members of a society who may have many competing or emerging interests to share the same fantasies, arguing that ‘formulaic evolution and change are one process by which new interests and values can be assimilated into conventional imaginative structures’.72 This perspective offers a way for us to understand the cultural alignment between Ouida and Corelli. Despite the insistent view of their coeval literary critics that their work was lacking in realism, Cawelti’s theoretical model suggests that their audiences recognized that their fictional worlds upheld ‘existing definitions of the world’ maintaining that culture’s ‘ongoing consensus about the nature of reality and morality’.73 It is not consensus of opinion that enables fiction to become so meaningful to broad and diverse audiences. Cawelti argues that successful formula fiction exploits cultural conflict while identifying the conflicting interests of different groups within the culture for which the novel has been produced. Ultimately, claims Cawelti, the formula novel will resolve the tensions and ambiguities it reveals, but only after engaging with contentious social concerns and then seeking a way of closing the lacuna of speculation that it raises, and which may be the main point of interest for the reader. In the cases of Ouida and Corelli, key are conflicting and constantly changing attitudes towards the values and ideological models of gendered behaviour. In order to develop and justify the emergence of strong women, both Corelli and Ouida constructed vast and complex narratives with multiple female characters, none of which individually may offer stable points of reference for readers, but from the totality of which readers can select aspects that appeal to them. Pamela Gilbert and Annette Federico consider these new imaginative constructs in their separate articles on, respectively, Ouida and Corelli for Nicola Thompson’s (1999) collection Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question. Both discuss the paradox of how Ouida and Corelli could hold anti-suffrage views while writing fiction which regularly portrayed autonomous women and which was critical of The various obituaries of Corelli are instructive (see Ransom, The Mysterious Miss Corelli, pp. 5–8). For comparable remarks on Ouida, see the Introduction above. 71 Western Mail, 15 October 1883, p. 2. ‘Romance and Realism’ was originally published as a letter to the Editor of The Times, 12 October 1883, pp. 3–4, and was subsequently re-issued in Frescoes (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883). 72 J.G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), p. 34. 73 Cawelti, Adventure, p. 35. 70

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abusive patriarchal power. Gilbert characterizes Ouida’s work as ‘riddled with contradictory messages’74 and Federico views Corelli’s choice to write outside dominant formulaic structures as enabling her ‘to give voice to opposing arguments which are often unsatisfactorily resolved.’75 Such insistence on ambiguity is entirely consonant with Cawelti’s hypothesis. Bestselling fiction does not conform to existing generic imperatives and conventions but instead refashions them by creating imaginative constructs which enable readers to consider, however briefly, alternative modes of lived experience and which, in turn, enable other writers to adopt them in their consideration of current cultural concerns. Such fiction is often topical and here Gilbert and Federico can identify the presence of themes more usually encountered in New Woman writing. Ouida used debates about eugenics, vivisection and the existence of women’s sexuality as a means to power, debates which also interested New Woman writers; Corelli, on the other hand, appealed to her audiences because she wrote for those diverse groups ‘who felt alienated from the tenets of emerging feminism and practitioners of the New Fiction’.76 Gilbert considers Ouida an enigma because she is able to valorize ‘women’s sexuality and love outside of marriage’77 while breaking the conventions of the sensation novel which had contained such immorality by depicting the fallen woman’s suffering and repentance. Ouida’s characters may not always be allowed to live, but they often remain active and assertive and are given heroic deaths. Ouida wants us to retain sympathy for them despite their misdeeds and amorality. In Cigarette of Under Two Flags (1867), for example, Ouida allows her readers to explore the sexually and physically active strong female protagonist. As King has shown, Cigarette even embodies the characteristics of the (male) professional.78 Gilbert’s careful analysis identifies at the core ‘racial/cultural hybridity [which] both grants the woman more freedom to act, and dooms them as tragic characters for whom no narrative is ultimately possible in the normative social world into which other characters must be integrated’.79 Ouida’s strong women do not on the whole achieve female empowerment at the conclusion of the narrative; they are instead involved in the transference of power to male characters who realize social and artistic goals. 74 Pamela Gilbert, ‘Ouida and the Other New Woman’, in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Diane Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 170–88, p. 171. 75 Annette R. Federico, ‘“An ‘old fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman’, Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, 241–59, p. 242. 76 Federico, ‘An “old fashioned” young woman’, p. 241. 77 Gilbert, ‘“Other” New Woman’, p. 184. 78 Andrew King, ‘“Army, Navy, Medicine, Law/ Church, Nobility, Nothing at All”: Towards the Study of Gender, the Professions and the Press in the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 5.2 (Summer 2009), paras 33–5. See also Jordan above, pp. 66–7. 79 Gilbert, ‘“Other” New Woman’, p. 173.

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Corelli, meanwhile, employs a convention through which to voice her opposition to patriarchy by developing an imaginative account of women as artists. Federico uses Felski’s identification of a central tension in Corelli’s work between her expressions of anger towards men and the desire for female ascension through the merging of male and female souls to argue that this allows Corelli to explore a version of cultural feminism without destabilizing existing gendered roles and positions.80 The idea of the genius as a ‘third sex’ that Ouida employs for ostensibly different political ends may also said to have the same function.81 Ultimately, however, Corelli attempts to construct ‘a specifically feminine aesthetic in opposition to patriarchal literary values and to the New Woman novel’.82 In doing so, Corelli aligns herself with Ouida in that both writers criticize the New Woman for emulating men and repeatedly conclude their novels without endorsing marriage as an ideal state for women. Ouida and Corelli negotiated transitions in values regarding women’s actualization of self which speculated on the possibilities of economic independence rather than compensatory idealizations of marriage and motherhood. Both, as spinsters, forcefully portrayed the destructive nature of nineteenthcentury marriage and used the gothic to show mothers endangering their daughters by treating them as commodities, as in The Sorrows of Satan (1895) and Moths (1880). Against this background and peril, self actualization is realized through the feminine aesthetic and a feminine system of morality and honour. The press reviews that Corelli and Ouida received often expressed disbelief in their popularity and incomprehension regarding the appeal of their fiction. In response Corelli professed that writers should be readers and continued to support Braddon’s contribution to the light fiction debate. Examining the tangential relationship between Corelli and Ouida puts us in greater connection with the gendered critical discourse on fiction which Lyn Pykett identifies.83 In the context of popular fiction, it is not just the representational authority of fiction which is at stake but entry to and sustainability of writing as a commercial career across a lifetime. The story which Corelli admires amongst Ouida’s writing begins with a woman’s disgrace, and traces her redemption through her own moral strength and willingness to live in her community on her own terms. In her essay on Ouida, Corelli champions romance as a form of realism that permits the insight of genius that is unfettered by social mores. Popular fiction has to align itself with prevailing social norms and values whilst identifying sites of cultural tension that the narrative may attempt to ameliorate, challenge or resolve. We cannot definitively know how nineteenth-century readers consumed texts, but Pykett advises us to avoid thinking Federico, ‘old fashioned’, p. 242; Felski, Gender of Modernity, p. 130. Cf. King ‘Sympathetic Individualism’, p. 573. 82 Federico, ‘old fashioned’, p. 247; and see Julia Kuehn, ‘The Strategies of the 80 81

Popular Novel: Marie Corelli’s Feminine Sublime and the Aesthetic of the Dream’, The Journal of Popular Culture, 41.6 (2008), 975–93, p. 980 83 Pykett, The Improper Feminine, p. 23.

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about audiences as cultural dupes and start to employ more effective theoretical models.84 Pleasure is important for the reader of popular fiction and this is found in intense emotional engagement, license to pursue what is personally meaningful or culturally relevant especially the taboo and being required to speculate on new or controversial points of view. Readers could appropriate, dismiss, expand and make connections beyond authorial intention. Catherine Gallagher identifies the key characteristic of the novel as its provision of ‘a seemingly free space in which to temporarily indulge imaginative play’85 where readers do not identify with characters but speculate upon them. The more options, contradictions and ellipses that readers are given, the more intense this imaginative activity can be for the reader. Rather than the romantic ideal they both played on, it is surely this capacity to offer writing that remains open while at the same time seeming firm and (to use Pykett’s term below) opinionated that constitutes the ‘genius’ of both Ouida and Corelli.

Pykett, The Improper Feminine, p. 77. Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Rise of Fictionality’, in The Novel, vol. 1: History,

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Geography and Culturei, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 336–63, p. 347.

Part III Ouida and Politics

Fig. 7.1

Othmar, cover, Chatto & Windus, 2 shilling yellowback, 1887

Chapter 7

Ouida and the Russians: Aristocratic Francophilia to Tolstoyism Diana Maltz1

Writing to Sydney Cockerell in 1901 to thank him for the gift of several translations from the Russian and later in 1904 following Cockerell’s visit to Russia, Ouida declared her frustration with the novelist and moralist Leo Tolstoy. It is not clear which of Tolstoy’s books Cockerell had sent her. They were likely neither War and Peace (1869) nor Anna Karenina (1877), but instead, later Christian writings, possibly the novel Resurrection (1899) or the influential treatise The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894). In such texts, Tolstoy had envisioned a world of universal voluntary altruism in which people treated one another kindly without the need for policing. Ouida wondered at his dismissal of the basic human instincts of violence and carnality: ‘Tolstoy must know as well as I do that numbers of people are born hopelessly vile or bad. … The mere sentimental “do unto others” etc. etc. cannot restrain the passions or rein in the appetites, or solve the problems of life.’2 ‘Fighting is natural to man,’ she continued, insisting, ‘Men would not live in peace together if armies were abolished.’3 In other letters, she pronounced his views ‘on the relations of the sexes … most mischievous,’ again because of his naïveté: ‘his morality and monogamy are against common sense and Nature.’4 One might guess the source of Ouida’s annoyance. In proposing a world without competition and in preaching abstinence from bodily pleasures like sex, Tolstoy’s tracts sought to de-legitimize the passions that propelled the characters in her novels: romantic love, covetousness and the desire for power over others. Generally, Tolstoy’s ideal of egalitarianism clashed with Ouida’s enthusiasm for class distinctions (reflected not only by her fictions but also by her modification of Ramé to de la Ramée). Further, his credo of an austere simplification of life would have offended the aesthete in Ouida, whose descriptions of interiors and costumes comprised a mélange of exquisite fabrics, glistening jewel stones, rare bibelots, and exotic blooms. I am grateful to Dr. Jane Jordan and Professor Lyn Pykett for their assistance in locating journal articles by Ouida. 2 Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 28 January 1904, in Friends of a Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, ed. Viola Meynell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940), p. 150. 3 Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 6 January 1904, Friends, p. 149. 4 Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 8 December 1901, Friends, p. 145; Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 2 January 1904, Friends, p. 148. 1

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Not long after posting Tolstoy’s volumes to Ouida, Sydney Cockerell, like many young British idealists, assumed the role of disciple and visited the aged writer at his Russian estate Yasnaya Polyana. Ouida responded by cautioning Cockerell about the ‘non-intellectual fibre of [Tolstoy’s] mind.’5 Do not mistake me; I think Tolstoy a great novelist, a great character for courage and self-sacrifice; but I cannot think a man who believes in Christianity is a man of great intellect, and his logic is sadly defective in many other ways. He judges the rest of the world by Russia …6

Perhaps most tellingly she blamed Tolstoy’s religiosity and illogicality on his nationality: ‘If he had been born in France he would have been a great man, but the frightful life of Russia has disturbed his brain.’7 What did Ouida find so ‘frightful’ about the life of Russia, and how did it fuel her imagination? Several of her novels of the early- to mid-1880s had focused on Russian culture itself: its nihilists, serfs, and dynastic families. Moths (1880), Wanda (1883), Princess Napraxine (1884) and Othmar (1885) offer evidence of her fascination with the subculture of Francophile Russian aristocracy and speculate wildly on Russian social mores and ethics. As I will argue, what seems most fascinating to Ouida about the Russian nobility is their modernity, borne of a hybridity that she registers as cultural, genetic and ethical. While they may seem arbitrary starting points, Russian character and culture are effective windows into Ouida’s concepts of what it means to be human and humane. In her fictions, Ouida both recreates and repudiates stereotypes of Russian barbarism: her Russians are subject to sadistic impulses as well as crises of guilt, domination as well as self-loathing. Into the 1890s, the figure of Tolstoy heralded a new age of conscience for readers internationally, and, for all that she regarded the novelist as misguided, Ouida evinced tentative alliances with radical communities in Britain who were inspired by him. Although she characteristically resisted being subsumed in any association, by publishing in Henry Salt’s journals The Humane Review, Humanity and The Humanitarian Ouida acknowledged allies among those British progressives who aspired to a life of mindfulness, compassion and peaceful coexistence with animals. Her allegiances were by nature eclectic, but they were at least partly in line with the politics espoused by Salt’s Humanitarian League. Among the contributors to Salt’s journals were English Tolstoyans, who, in addition to their membership in the League, played a considerable role in related organizations, the Peace Society, the International Peace and Arbitration Association, and the National Anti-Vivisection Society.

Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 2 January 1904, Friends, p. 148. Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 23 January 1904, Elizabeth Lee, Ouida: A Memoir

5 6

(London: T.F. Unwin, 1914), p. 201. 7 Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 28 January 1904, Friends, pp. 150–51.

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Ouida and Russian Francophilia: 1880–1885 The four Ouida novels discussed here fit into a general spectrum of creative works from the fin de siècle preoccupied with Russian-ness that included Oscar Wilde’s play Vera; or The Nihilists (1880), Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown (1884), Menie Muriel Dowie’s A Girl in the Karpathians (1891) and George Gissing’s The Crown of Life (1899). A number of British fictions were clearly Russophobic, particularly following the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 and the media coverage of anarchist plots in the 1890s. Yet a new British Russophile fiction was also developing and gaining inspiration from the increasing number of translations of Russian classics by Aylmer Maude and Constance Garnett. How authentic were Ouida’s representations of expatriate Russians and St. Petersburg society? She appears to have been relatively informed about Russian history, from Russia’s historic partitioning of Poland, to political dissidents’ torture and exile to Siberia under Nicholas I, to the 1861 emancipation of the serfs under Alexander II. Characters in her novel Wanda debate the merits of Bakunin and Kropotkin.8 She employs particular Russian vocabulary to enhance local color, calling a peasant hut an isba (p. 2) and a carriage a telegue (p. 6). Following her move to Florence in 1871, she sustained relationships with Russian émigrés such as Marchesa Incontri (formerly, Princess Galitzine) and Pierre de Tchiatcheff (to whom, with his wife Emilie, she dedicated Princess Napraxine).9 Her letters in the early twentieth century demonstrate strong convictions about the Russo-Japanese war.10 Yet in her own time, critics reviled the interiority of the court she represented, claiming that Ouida’s Russian imperial life could be set anywhere. A New York Times critic reviewing Wanda scathingly referred to its ‘impossible Russian landscape’ and the ‘touch of insincerity’ with which Ouida described what she ‘is pleased to call the Volga countryside.’11 Arguably, however, this overdeterminedness – this replaceability of the Russian court with any court – is where the interest lies in Ouida’s fictional world. Her Russian protagonists are rootless and hybrid, negotiating a temperament she deems Russian and a training in French cultural mores. For all that Ouida refers to a ‘Tartar’ type of face or disposition and for all that she describes the Russian custom of mourning or Russian style of horseback riding, her protagonists’ dialogue is littered with French terms, just as their dress echoes Parisian fashions. In this regard, Ouida is accurate. They are the inheritors of a cultural Francophilia initially enforced in early 1700s through decrees by Peter the Great and further practised under Catherine II.12 Like all nineteenth-century Russian aristocrats, they are have fully assimilated Western dress, culinary practices, Ouida, Wanda (London: Chatto & Windus, 1884), p. 101. Lee, Ouida, p. 41, p. 64, p. 67. 10 Ibid., pp. 204–5, p. 211, p. 301. 11 ‘Ouida’s “Wanda,”’ New York Times, August 13, 1883. 12 Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural 8 9

History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 3–4, pp. 8–10, p. 15, p. 17, pp. 32–3.

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pursuits like fencing, and French as a primary language.13 Their culture would be unrecognizable to their grandparents.14 Far from feeling any sentimentality towards Russian history, they disdain it. In the novel Moths, Zouroff ‘[hates] Russia with all his might’ and resides there as little as possible.15 Compelled by the Tsar to return and ‘to complete the twelve months’ residence which had been commanded him,’ he slyly uses his wife’s miscarriage as an excuse for an early departure to the French Riviera and its gambling tables (Moths, p. 206). A character anticipates, ‘They will go to Petersburg once in ten years, but Paris will see them every year of their lives; Zouroff can scarcely be said to exist out of it’ (Moths, p. 233). As the grown daughter of an ambassador, who is ‘more Parisienne than the Parisiennes,’ Princess Napraxine feigns a tubercular condition to avoid living in Russia.16 She leaves her two sons to be raised there by relatives, despising them for their ugly resemblance to their ‘Kalmuck’ father (Princess Napraxine, p. 27, p. 377, p. 171). Ouida’s Russo-Ethics British novelists had historically vacillated between representing Russians as barbaric and lauding the heroism of figures such as Peter the Great, notable for his adoption and advocacy of Western culture.17 In the early nineteenth century, English Russophilia hit its height as novelists celebrated Czar Alexander I as an ally against Napoleon.18 But 20 years later, novelists doubled back and pursued a particularly Russophobic line, especially after Russia’s violent suppression of the Polish insurrection in 1830 and the advent of the Crimean War in 1854.19 The Russian Cossack was painted in the press as hairy, primitive, a kind of invading Goth.20 Ouida’s work complexly negotiates this stereotype. Certainly, she constructs melodramatic Russian aristocrats compelled by vile impulses and complicit in what she would later call ‘the most brutal government that the world holds.’21 She also spies an inherent dignity in Russian peasants struggling to survive their bitter landscape; her references to bomb-throwing Nihilists and revolutionaries are always tempered by sympathy for the poverty of serfs both before and after their 1861 emancipation. 15 16 17 13

Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 3. Ouida, Moths (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2005), p. 206. Ouida, Princess Napraxine (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1884), p. 322. Anthony Glenn Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature from the Sixteenth Century to 1980 (Oxford: W.A. Meeuws, 1985), p. 9–12. 18 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 19 Ibid., pp. 24–6. 20 John Tenniel, ‘A Good Joke,’ Punch, 23 July 1853. See also Honoré Daumier. ‘Actualités, no. 28; Les Cosaques pour rire (Laughing at the Cossacks), no. 16.’ Le Charivari, 4 April 1854, p. 28. 21 Ouida, ‘The Legislation of Fear’, in Views and Opinions (London: Methuen and Co., 1896), p. 384. 14

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But, perhaps most pointedly, Ouida defines her Russian nobles as a specific modern, artificial type. In Othmar, Princess Napraxine says, ‘We are all stove plants – children of a forced culture and an unreal atmosphere. In our real natures, we are cruel, fierce, fickle, Slav toto corde. In our social relations we are the most polished of all people.’22 She glories in Russia because ‘[t]he intense and sharp contrasts of life which were there, the supreme culture beside the dense ignorance, the hothouse beside the isba, the orchid beside the icicle … stimulated her surfeited taste and moved her languid imagination’(Othmar, p. 165). Across several novels, Ouida defines the Russian imperial enclave as a kind of glass conservatory that fosters unnatural growth.23 The moral Vere in Moths is affronted by it: ‘you live in a hothouse with your palms, and the poor are all around you in the ice; everything is like that’ (Moths, p. 344). Ominously, Napraxine argues that she sees the future of Europe in Russia, the blending of cosmopolitan culture and rough barbarism, not simply, it would seem, in antagonistic camps of aristocrats and serfs, but within individuals (Othmar, pp. 132–3). Ouida never seeks to eradicate the Russian aristocracy, but she does want to humanize them. The Countess Wanda in the novel of that name distinguishes herself by administering to her Austrian folk, setting up schools, giving alms and rescuing them from floods. Significantly, she instructs her husband in this type of homegrown ethics as well, bidding him to return to Finistèrre and make something of the desolate region of his origins. Ouida sumptuously represents the racy life of Paris salons, but moralizes at the same time that the peasant lands are where her aristocrats genuinely belong. They literally have jobs to do. At the start of Wanda, Prince Zabaroff hardly remembers having previously visited the village where he impregnated Vassia’s peasant mother, and actually giggles when he realizes that he owns the estate within view (Wanda, p. 2). The management of his property has been relegated to a steward he has never even met. Almost in answer, in the novel Othmar, Platon Napraxine leaves this cautionary legacy to his children: ‘Let them be Russians always … Let them love no soil but Russia’ (Othmar, p. 38). In compliance with his dying wishes, the brothers will be reared in their Russian homeland because: [t]he curse of Russians is the foreign life, the foreign tongue, the foreign ways, which draw them away from their people, make their lands unknown and indifferent to them, and lead them to squander on foreign cities and on foreign wantons the roubles wrung by their stewards in their absence from their dependents. Paris is the succursale of Petersburg, and it is also its hell. When the Russian nobles shall live in their own homes, the Nihilist will have little justification and the Jew will be unable to drain the peasantry as a cancer drains the blood. (Othmar, p. 38)

Ouida, Othmar (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1902), p. 132. Princess Napraxine herself is referred to repeatedly as a hothouse flower: see

22 23

Princess Napraxine, p. 9, p. 27, p. 70, p. 244, p. 398. She lives in overheated rooms surrounded by orchids: see p. 402.

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His obvious anti-Semitism aside, Platon Napraxine is speaking to a kind of benevolent paternalism from which absentee aristocrats like Zouroff in Moths and Zabaroff in Wanda have absconded. Historically, not all Russian aristocrats neglected their tenure, but it is worthwhile to recognize that their relationships with serfs differed from the inherited tradition and sense of fealty between European lords and peasants. The Russian gentry had not owned their estates for hundreds of years: the first had received theirs from the Peter the Great in the 1700s in reward for service.24 What this means is that they did not have a strong sense of roots in the region or connection with the local people.25 It has been suggested that they better resembled slave owners of the American south than English lords.26 While the historian Priscilla Roosevelt does not discuss the lure of European cities, she does note that, as in eighteenth-century Versailles, Russian nobles sought to reside in St. Petersburg where they could curry favor with the czar and receive further benefits.27 They perceived their rural estates as showpieces rather than permanent homes, and many only stayed there in the summer.28 To delineate the ethics of her Russian protagonists, Ouida artfully associates their private cruelties in personal relations with the brutal treatment of political dissidents and serfs back home, returning insistently to the twin images of the scourge and Siberian exile. In Moths, for instance, Duchess Jeanne de Sonnaz mocks Prince Zouroff’s claims to power and his innate sadism during one of his tantrums by characterizing them as Russian: ‘You have no serfs now, even in Russia. You can have none of us knouted’(Moths, p. 369). Zouroff’s banishment of his child bride Vere to his isolated Polish estate recalls an earlier scene in which poor locals are rounded up by the police in preparation for their Siberian exile (Moths, pp. 382–3). In Princess Napraxine, when reproached for her ‘subtle, arrogant, and cruel’ dismissal of her courtiers, the chaste Nadine Napraxine responds, ‘do not talk to me about my lovers; I have none.’ ‘You have no serfs in Russia but you have moujiks [peasants],’ replies Lady Brancepath, ‘and it is still much the same thing, as far as their submission goes’ (Princess Napraxine, p. 171). Generally, the political context is used to heighten our sense of Russian characters’ callousness. Following her journey into Siberia by dogsled to obtain a pardon for a writer condemned by the government, Napraxine diminishes her listeners’ sense of her compassion by framing her quest in a blithe way, claiming that she had always ‘had a fancy to visit Siberia in winter’ (Princess Napraxine, p. 335). In retrospect, she casually recognizes that it was mere chance that she had been in a mood to receive the writer’s family, hear their pleas, and pursue his vindication: ‘If they had come to me when I had been annoyed about anything, or when I had had a toilet I Roosevelt, 30–32. Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Illinois:

24 25

Northern Illinois University Press, 1985), 30. 26 Roosevelt, Life, p. 105, p. 130, p. 230, p. 319. 27 Ibid., p. 20, p. 26. 28 Ibid., pp. 29–32.

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disliked, or a visit that had wearied me, I should have said “No” and left Boganof in Siberia’(Princess Napraxine, p. 339). Ouida again relies on associations of Russian tyranny in the sequel Othmar to demonstrate Princess Napraxine’s willfulness and self-interest: when Napraxine succumbs to jealous fears of her husband’s infidelity, she has him shadowed by a loyal former serf (Othmar, p. 285). As Russian nobles, Princess Napraxine and Zouroff unite modern social propriety with a primitive instinct; comfortably at home in French culture, they are heartless by nature. Although Princess Napraxine is the acme of conscious self-control, customarily withering her suitors with a cold glance and sarcastic laugh, she recognizes her legacy: ‘[t]hey forget that, not a century ago, our great-grandparents were slaying Paul and Peter in their palaces, and could knout to death whole villages of men, women, and children, at their mere freak and fancy’ (Princess Napraxine, p. 403). When a priest questions ‘the ferocity and the despotism of a thousand centuries of Barbaric boyers’ beneath her cultivated exterior, she replies, ‘I have no doubt something of it,’ and brandishes an imaginary whip (Princess Napraxine, p. 329). Painted with broader strokes than Napraxine, Zouroff constitutes a kind of anti-sophisticate, bestial, somewhat embryonic; although adept in the world of Riviera casinos, he is at the mercy of his impulses, or as Ouida puts it, the devil in his blood – his Russian blood. His wife Vere is grateful that her babies had not lived, for they would be ‘taken away from her, reared in creeds and ways alien to her, they would be Zouroff Princes, whose baby tyrannies would find a hundred sycophants’ (Moths, p. 357). Above all, they would be their father’s sons: ‘they would have his passions and cruelties’ (Moths, p. 357). Zouroff’s bad blood impels him towards his more lascivious acts: he apparently either exposes Vere to pornography or narrates it for her (‘he cast all the naked truths of human vices before her shrinking mind’) (Moths, p. 255). It is even more kinky that Zouroff is one of Ouida’s men who also fall into masochism when in the thrall of a wicked femme fatale. It seems a fitting retribution that in achieving his divorce from Vere, he ironically finds his punishment under Duchess Jeanne de Sonnaz who promises that she will, as his new wife, have him dancing like a bear (a telltale reference both to the innate brutality of the Russians for whom this is entertainment and to Ouida’s own activism against animal cruelty) (Moths, p. 542). That Jeanne phrases this resolve in French tells us something more of the transnational nature of sadism and degeneracy in Ouida’s fictions. One might imagine that acculturation into French society would be an antidote to Eastern barbarism, but this is not the case. Countess Olga Brancka, the villainess of Wanda, wears ‘the perfume of Paris’ and gaily affirms the decadence of her society; she is ‘destructive and caressing … capricious, malicious and … even … violent’ as she channels her acumen into plots to ruin others (Wanda, p. 127). A climate of dissipation also defines the Côte d’Azur, which is distinguished in the novel Moths by casinos, social-climbing American heiresses, skimpy bathing gowns, and the despoliation of the landscape back home as English gentry drill their estates for coal and quick cash. The shallow theatrical life of Paris and the anti-culture of Monte Carlo bring out the worst in these people. The Russians have

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adopted the excessive etiquette and artificiality of a Versailles: ‘our lives are … divided between petits couverts and grand couverts [small meals and large meals], and there is no other time left’ (Moths, p. 337). In Moths, Ouida promotes an idea of the Second Empire as a fall from Eden, from an earlier refined French aristocracy. The elderly Lady Stoat identifies oldworld values in Vere, the ingénue heroine: ‘she always makes me think of those dear old stately hotels with their grand gardens in which I saw, in my girlhood, the women, who in theirs, had known France before ’30. Those hotels and their gardens are gone, most of them, and there are stucco and gilt paint in their places’ (Moths, p. 246). If Lady Stoat can look back to French society before the July Revolution of 1830 and see high-minded ancestors there, what have the Russians to look back to? The one reference to Zouroff’s royal line paints a picture of cold-blooded conquest: Only a generation or two back his forefathers had bought beautiful Persian women by heaping up the scales of barter with strings of pearls and sequins, and had borne off Circassian slaves in forays with simple payment of a lance left in the lifeless breasts of the men who had owned them: his wooing was of the same rude sort (Moths, p. 195)

And there is a legacy of rape: ‘The shrinking coldness, the undisguised aversion, of his betrothed only whetted his passion to quicker ardor, as the shrieks of the Circassian captives or the quivering limbs of the Persian slaves had done that of his forefathers in Ukraine’ (Moths, p. 195). For all that such characterization reprises stereotypes of barbarity that were a staple of Russophobic fictions of the nineteenth century, not all of Ouida’s Russian nobles are as outwardly vicious as Zouroff. Through the ‘Napraxine’ novels, she establishes the figure of the inherently contradictory and self-aware mondaine.29 Men duel over Nadine Napraxine and commit suicide for her, but throughout she remains detached and, in her mind, inculpable. It is true that she inherits Zouroff’s controlling nature: at her coldest, she appreciates Russia because it gives her license to exercise her dominance: ‘[t]he vassalage and submission of the people gave her a sense of absolute dominion, more entire than any she could feel elsewhere’ (Othmar, p. 165). Yet Princess Napraxine is not so much immoral as amoral. A priest chides her at one point, ‘one cannot but regret that a person capable of such fine sympathy and such noble effort as yourself should pass nearly the whole of her time in sedulously endeavouring to persuade the world that she has no heart and herself that she has no soul’ (Princess Napraxine, p. 338). Napraxine is languorous, indifferent, skeptical, epicurean, fastidious, unfeeling – and satisfied by all these traits. On Ouida’s mondaines, see Talia Schaffer, ‘Ouida, Wilde, and the Popular Romance,’ in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 221. See also the chapter, ‘The Dandy in the House’ in her The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville and London University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 122–58. 29

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Genetic Hybridity and Ethical Dissolution in Wanda If Zouroff and Princess Napraxine are at ease in French culture and consequently further tainted by its modernity, the virtue of Wanda’s far more likeable protagonist Vassia Kazán is his discomfort. Vassia, alias the Marquis de Sabran, experiences his own hybridity as a victim of cultural and biological convergences. He has renounced Russia along with his real name and has willingly assimilated into his wife’s Austrian dynastic culture. Yet, even so, as he plays Liszt for his wife, his fingers stray up the keyboard to reprise the melancholy Tartar folk-songs of his youth (Wanda, p. 288). He remains haunted by his Russianness, never truly free of it. Vassia Kazán retains a pure simplicity as the son of a serf mother while also inheriting royal bloodlines through his princely father. Here victimization and royal lineage do not exist as an either/or. With his Persian and Circassian features, Vassia Kazán is half-descended from those whom Zouroff’s ancestors bore off, enslaved, and raped. (Confusingly enough, he has a ‘beautiful fair Circassian face,’ yet is described some paragraphs beforehand as bearing the Prince’s own face, ‘as like him as an eaglet to an eagle,’ hinting that Zabaroff’s own genetic line is a motley one) (Wanda, p. 4, p. 5). Penniless and handsome, Vassia fulfills Ouida’s populism and fetish for aristocracy at the same time. Romantically enough, he has been raised by his great-grandmother in a hut with bear-cubs. Vassia’s native abjection is something that Ouida returns to insistently. ‘I believe I am a serf in Russia’ (Wanda, p. 10). ‘You would be a serf if you were in Russia’ (Wanda, p. 228). ‘You were born a serf; you shall feel the knout’ (Wanda, p. 376). At the height of his sorrow and shame, he wishes that he had been left on the Volga plains rather than educated, so that he might fulfill his god-given destiny as a hunter. But he is educated, so much that he can edit a famous manuscript, speak multiple languages, play Parsifal to Wanda in her medieval Austrian fortress, assume a role as a politician in Paris, and not least, make the spinet sing with Haydn and Liszt. He has a moral compass and is haunted by the dishonesty of his assumed name and title. His internal conflicts bypass the mere management of bad temper that characterizes Prince Zouroff in Moths. At the same time, what seems most intriguing in this narrative is the root cause of Vassia Kazán’s guilt. On the one hand, he has simply lied about his identity and betrayed his wife’s trust in him, and for this, he and his discoverers condemn him as a coward. On the other hand, the reason for his lie, the degraded class that is his birthright, is continuously posited as a source of shame in itself. For all that he is an innocent child of nature in the first ten pages of the book and for all that his Persian great-grandmother raises him lovingly and gently, we see that Ouida later buys into myths of lowness and pedigree. Through an omniscient third-person narrator, we witness Vassia’s internal reproach over having sullied Wanda’s noble bloodline by conceiving children with her. Significantly, Ouida does nothing as narrator to intercede and contradict these feelings. With distaste, Vassia perceives his eldest son as an abomination: ‘a living sign of how the blood of a Russian lord and of a Persian peasant had been infused into the blood of the Austrian

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nobles’ (Wanda, p. 264). He rebukes himself, ‘What had he brought to this haughty and chivalrous race? – the servile Slav, the barbaric Persian, blood, and all the dishonour that their creed would hold the basest on earth’ (Wanda, p. 351). Upon learning of his secret, his angelic wife Wanda is also horrified, not only by his lie, but also by this innate peasant foulness. In fact, she (and Ouida) merge his two sins of serfdom and falsehood: he is a ‘base-born imposter’; her miscarried child was ‘begotten of a serf, of a coward!’ (Wanda, p. 388). As Vassia had anticipated, she feels more than personally deceived, but angered that her bloodline, the future of her ‘race,’ has been betrayed. ‘Had it been any other crime than this! – this [his peasant lineage] which cankered all the honor of her race, and was rank with the abhorred putridity of fraud [his lie]!’ (Wanda, p. 431). Her debasement is further represented through the sexualized metaphor of penetration and contamination: ‘in her heart there seemed a great knife plunged, a knife rusted with blood that was dishonoured’; her cousin Egon, who would avenge her by assassinating Vassia, calls her a ‘violated saint’ (Wanda, p. 388, p. 390). For several chapters, she can no longer embrace her children because she, too, perceives serf blood in them. The last hundred pages of the book rest on the question of whether she will overcome her feelings of betrayal to welcome Vassia back – and when she does, he dies a page later, like the fallen woman who cannot be permitted to live on in Victorian fiction. As we will see, these are muddy waters. Inasmuch as Vassia feels contempt for his own serf bloodline, he also assumes (and Ouida would have us believe, harbours) an innate superiority over others through his father’s imperial lineage. ‘Naturally of proud temper, and of an intellect which gave him ascendancy over others, he had from the first moment he had assumed the marquisate of Sabran received all the acknowledgement of his rank with an honest unconsciousness of imposture. After all he had in his veins blood as patrician as that of the Sabrans’ (Wanda, p. 262). Wanda too later admits to herself, ‘He had inherited the qualities of a race of princes, though he had descended unlawfully from them. His title had been a borrowed thing, unlawfully worn; but his supreme distinction of manner, his tact, his bodily grace, that large and temperate view of men and things which marks a gentleman, these had all been inborn and natural to him’ (Wanda, p. 413). Yet, to add to this complexity, Vassia spies in his son Bela’s arrogance and callousness evidence of an emerging Russian imperial tyrannical nature (one to which he seems inexplicably immune). So summarily, in Vassia’s eyes, to be Russian is a lose-lose situation, regardless of one’s economic or ethnic origin: it carries either the taint of peasant coarseness or aristocratic malevolence. Although Vassia’s general daily behaviour and painful guilt offer evidence of his moral stature, Ouida as a narrator never overtly steps in to undermine his and other characters’ class and ethnic assumptions. Indeed, in order to win Wanda’s forgiveness, Vassia must redeem himself through three years of self-exile and the heroic, ultimately suicidal, rescue of his son from an icy precipice.

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Ouida and Tolstoyan English Counterculture Given the moral ambiguity she ascribed to the Russian sensibility, Ouida must have found it incomprehensible that so many of her British countrymen turned to Tolstoy as the prophet of a new ethics at the end of the century. Proclaiming her own atheism, she critiqued others’ grasping at the comfort offered by Christianity generally and by Tolstoy’s brand of it in particular. She pondered: If you do not believe in the divinity of Christ what remains? What of course was always there, a poor man of fine instincts sore troubled by the suffering and the injustice which torment Tolstoy today. He drew the poor after him, naturally, by his assurances that the future would compensate them for their painful labour. But I have never been able to understand how theories so crude, so illogical, so uneducated, and unsupported, could ever attract or satisfy intellectual minds. … Tolstoy is dangerous because he is misleading. He is an educated Christ.30

If Tolstoy is an ‘educated Christ,’ then, by Ouida’s lights, he is stubbornly defiant against his better logic. In the 1900s, Ouida thus shifts from speculating on Russians’ inherited hybrid national and cultural identities, mixed genetic strains, and irreconcilable ethical impulses to a specific crux in Tolstoy between meagre intellect and novelistic genius. She writes to Sydney Cockerell, ‘Surely Tolstoy is far from a great thinker – though a great writer? He seems a rather ridiculous person in the book you sent me.’31 She reiterates in a later letter, ‘I think, as I have always done, that Tolstoy is a great genius but not a great intellect. The two are distinct…’.32 She never explains this dichotomy any further. Beyond his unswerving Christian faith, Tolstoy also preached a denial of private ownership, veneration for subsistence farming (‘bread labour’), and faith in bodily self-discipline, notably celibacy. As much as these principles may have vexed Ouida, a generation of self-identified radical men and women were drawn to Tolstoy precisely because of them. A chance purchase of an English translation of Tolstoy’s How I Came to Believe (1884) in the Oxford train station in 1902 led Stephen Hobhouse, the son of a wealthy Liberal political family, to renounce his inheritance, pursue a life of voluntary simplicity in a Hoxton slum, and adopt Quakerism and pacifism (he was later imprisoned during the first world war as a conscientious objector).33 Hobhouse’s story constituted a dramatic version of the spiritual conversion experienced by many others.

Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 28 January 1904, Meynell, Friends, p. 150. Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 23 December 1901, Meynell, Friends, p. 146. 32 Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 7 July 1904, cited in Eileen Bigland, Ouida the 30 31

Passionate Victorian (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1951), p. 250. 33 On Hobhouse’s conversion, see Stephen Hobhouse, The Autobiography of Stephen Hobhouse, Reformer, Pacifist, Christian (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), pp. 59–63.

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Tolstoyism occupied a substantial place alongside other countercultural beliefs in the rich, complex world of socialist fellowship.34 As a recent critic has noted, this ‘religion of socialism’ rather messily integrated ‘spiritualism, Theosophy, Emersonian transcendentalism, Nietzschean notions of the will, Ruskinian medievalism, alongside the more material influences of Marx and Engels.’35 Among their causes, social radicals advocated rigorous examination of the individual conscience in daily life, back-to-the-land simplicity, co-education for children, and the eradication of servanthood. Espousing a rhetoric of Christian socialism, mysticism, anarchism, and humanitarianism, they were quick to embrace Tolstoy’s rejection of industrial modernity and its degradations and his honesty about sexuality (if not always his asceticism). A conduit between Ouida and New Life circles in Britain did exist in the writer, social reformer and Honorary Secretary of the Humanitarian League, Henry Salt. The two pursued a lively correspondence on pacifism and animal rights. Salt clearly respected Ouida, quoting her Fortnightly Review essay, ‘Death and Pity’ (April 1892) in his own tracts.36 As the editor of several progressive journals, including Humanity, later named The Humanitarian (1895–1919), and The Humane Review (1900–1910), Salt unsuccessfully sought essays from her on vegetarianism (she did not practise it) and the sacrifice of small mammals to feed snakes in zoos (she agreed it was appalling but contributed no article on it). She did contribute articles on other topics.37 There is a substantial body of criticism on Tolstoy’s disciples in Britain and their utopian experiments. See W.H.G. Armytage, ‘J. C. Kenworthy and the Tolstoyan Communities in England’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 16.4 (July 1957), 391–405, and Michael J. de K. Holman, ‘The Purleigh Colony: Tolstoyan Togetherness in the Late 1890s’, in New Essays on Tolstoy, ed. M.V. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 194–222. Both of these essays have been reprinted in Tolstoi and Britain, ed. Gareth Jones (Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg, 1995), pp. 135–52, pp. 153–84, Jones’s essay collection also contains R.F. Christian’s ‘The Road to Yasnaya Polyana: Some Pilgrims from Britain and Their Reminiscences’, pp. 185–216. On the dissemination of Tolstoy’s writings by the Croydon Brotherhood’s and Purleigh Colony’s publishing ventures, see also Michael J. de K. Holman, ‘Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press: Vladimir Chertkov and his English Manager Robert Fifield’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 66.2 (1988), 184–97, and James D. Hunt, ‘Gandhi, Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans’, in The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective, eds Harvey Leonard Dyck and Peter Brock (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 260–77. 35 Ruth Livesey, ‘Morris, Carpenter, Wilde and the Political Aesthetics of Labour,’ Victorian Literature and Culture, 32 (2004), 601–16, p. 604. The phrase ‘religion of socialism’ was popularized by Stephen Yeo’s classic essay, ‘“A New Life”: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896,’ History Workshop Journal, 4 (1977), 5–56. 36 Henry S. Salt and Albert Leffingwell, Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress, With a Bibliographical Appendix (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 13, p. 93, p. 103. 37 Ouida published ‘The Scientific Torture of Lunatics. A Protest’, Humanity, 2 (November 1897), 82–4, ‘The Culture of Cowardice’ The Humane Review (May 1900), 110–20, and an article in The Humanitarian (March 1908), quoted in the Review of Reviews (March 1908), 391. I am unable to trace the name of this last article. 34

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As a central figure in the New Age vanguard, Salt claimed as friends and colleagues Edward Carpenter, G.B. Shaw, R.B. Cunningham Graham, Graham Wallas, and Sidney Olivier. All of these were affiliated with high-minded reform groups, including the Fabian Society and its predecessor, the Fellowship of the New Life (of which Carpenter had been a founder, and Salt and Salt’s brotherin-law, Jim Joynes, early members). Proposing ‘the cultivation of a perfect character in each and all,’ the FNL had begun as an experiment in group-living with members sharing a Fellowship House in Bloomsbury.38 By 1894, associates headed by socialist J.C. Kenworthy moved to Croydon, Surrey to set up a Brotherhood Church, cooperative store, and later, a communal farm.39 Kenworthy had undergone a conversion to Tolstoyism in 1890, and the Croydon Brotherhood Church was characterized by both Christian socialism and Tolstoyan anarchism.40 As an editor, Salt solicited and published contributions from Kenworthy and Aylmer Maude, an affiliate of the Croydon community who, with his spouse Louise, undertook the translation and dissemination of Tolstoy’s writings in Britain; Maude wrote the definitive biography of Tolstoy.41 Arguably, Salt sought to legitimize Ouida to his radical cohort. He published her essay, ‘The Culture of Cowardice,’ in the 1900 volume of his Humane Review, alongside Kenworthy’s ‘A Visit to Tolstoy’ and a review of a book by Tolstoy’s disciple Vladimir Tchertkoff about the oppressed Christian-pacifist Russian Doukhober sect. (This book had been published by the Free Age Press at Purleigh Colony, an outgrowth of the Croydon community.) In her journalism, Ouida’s thinking did parallel Tolstoy’s in some ways, most notably in her advocacy of animal rights. Both abhorred hunting for sport, and just as Ouida denounced vivisection, Tolstoy’s essay, ‘The First Step’ (1891) vividly exposed the cruelty of a slaughterhouse in order to sanction vegetarianism.42 Ouida further deferred to Tolstoy’s wisdom as a pacifist in an essay she published in 1900.43 If Tolstoy’s recent novel Resurrection was a text that Cockerell had sent Fabian Society Meetings Minutes 1883–1888, 24 October 1883, Fabian Collection, C36, British Library of Political and Economic Science Archives, LSE. 39 For many years, the Fellowship of the New Life was dismissed as a flakey, less sensible precursor to the Fabian Society. Recent scholarship has worked to revise this assessment: see Kevin Manton, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life: English Ethical Socialism Reconsidered,’ History of Political Thought, 24.2 (2003), 282–304. 40 Holman, ‘Purleigh Colony’, 156. Following the arrival in Britain of Tolstoy’s close disciple and confidant Vladimir Chertkov, Aylmer Maude worked at the Brotherhood Church’s breakaway colony, Purleigh in Essex, as a translator for Chertkov’s Free Age Press, which published pamphlets and books by Tolstoy in English and Russian. Out of a desire to propagate his ideas as widely as possible and to defy principles of private property, Tolstoy had deliberately abandoned copyright ownership when he forged an alliance with the press. 41 Holman, ‘Translating’, 192. 42 Ronald D. LeBlanc offers a persuasive analysis of Tolstoy’s vegetarianism in the context of his larger asceticism in later life, particularly sexual abstinence. See his ‘Tolstoy’s Way of No Flesh: Abstinence, Vegetarianism, and Christian Physiology’, in Food in Russian History and Culture, eds Musya Glants and Joyce Stetson Toomre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 81–102. 43 Ouida, ‘The Culture of Cowardice,’ The Humane Review (July 1900), 115. 38

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her, then Ouida would have approved its critique of the excesses and hypocrisies of military culture. There is no doubt that she did read Tolstoy’s letter to The Times, ‘Bethink Yourselves’ (27 June 1904) protesting against the Russo-Japanese War, as she affirmed its message (again, if not its religious faith) in a letter to Cockerell that July.44 While not inclined to take either side, Ouida targeted British citizens for the arbitrariness of their support of Japan.45 Her letters of the period are harsh towards the Japanese, disparaging ‘their stupid superstitions, their groveling Emperor-worship, their rejection of love to the lowest plane, [and] their savage murders and suicides,’ this last ‘suicidal mania’ the catalyst for their ‘war craze.’46 Through Ouida’s eyes, Russia appears moderate by comparison. Still, in her most zealous political essays of the 1890s, Ouida had censured post-Risorgimento infringements on human rights in Italy by equating them with Russian methods of torture, and indeed, her description of the arbitrary punishment ‘domicilio coatto’ (compulsory domicile) in 1894 evoked a kind of Siberian exile.47 In 1904, Ouida summarily condemned both Japan and Russia as ‘cruel savages with a veneer of civilization,’ and this phrase reiterates her denunciation of Russia in Princess Napraxine 20 years earlier.48 Conclusion Ouida’s disgust at modern trends and movements – which included New Womanhood and female suffrage – distinguished her last years at Bagni di Lucca. In letters, she mourned the lost charms of an earlier age. Her Russian novels of the 1880s had repudiated a glittering, manic, ruthless world of showy salons and soirees, even as they catalogued its exotic splendours. It is ironic that Ouida did not perceive Tolstoy recoiling from the same superficial class performances (as detailed, for instance, in his novellas of the late 1880s, The Kreutzer Sonata and Family Happiness). Ouida’s solution was to have her heroes and heroines withdraw to a pure feudal setting of ancient European fortresses and mountain retreats: Yseulte and Othmar to Amyot, Wanda and Vassia to Hohenszalras, Vere and Correze to the Alps above Sion. Tolstoy’s answer to the corrupt present was not to revere the old feudalism, but to dismantle and revise it by joining his peasants at Yasnaya Polyana and embracing simplification. Such classless asceticism was a choice antithetical to Ouida’s own temperament. (However, it should be noted that Ouida was not the only writer of the fin de siècle to interrogate Tolstoy’s social practice: Turgenev, for instance, branded him a ‘genius and crank.’49) 46 47

Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 7 July 1904 in Bigland, Ouida, p. 250. Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 7 June 1904 in ibid., p. 249. Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 7 June 1904 in ibid., p. 250. Ouida, ‘The Legislation of Fear’, Views and Opinions (London: Methuen, 1896), p. 385, p. 390. 48 Undated letter to Sydney Cockerell, in Bigland, Ouida, p. 249; Ouida, Princess Napraxine, p. 329. 49 Henry Gifford, Introduction, War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xv. 44 45

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In the end, despite her correspondence with Henry Salt and contributions to his journal, Ouida’s humanitarian sympathies did not soften her towards Tolstoy’s social theology. Tolstoy’s most enduring contribution to social thought was his advocacy of non-resistance to evil (the ideology that would, of course, later inform Ghandi’s notions of civil disobedience). Ouida, by contrast, expressed a characteristic desire for immediate intervention and rectification whenever she encountered injustice. She named circumstances where she found revolutionary violence not only justifiable, but also laudable. As she wrote in A Village Commune (1880), ‘When the Socialist burns or the Nihilist slays, the wise men wonder! Blind and mad, no doubt, are the Socialists and the Nihilists, but as blind and mad are the rulers of the people who treat the honest citizen like the criminal.’50 As I have argued elsewhere, Ouida departed from the British mainstream press in her compassion for anarchists: just as their use of force satisfied her instinct for the theatrical, their tales of suffering appealed to her customary defense of the downtrodden.51 So it follows that Ouida’s pacifism was selective: in the 1890s, her journalistic essays protested the social costs of conscription to communities and the greed of invasive colonial powers, but in her early and later romances, she respectively valorized the dashing soldier and the rebel employing guerilla tactics against the state.52 Ouida likewise kept aloof from the practical social reforms pursued by Tolstoy’s supporters. The protagonist of her 1897 comic novella, An Altruist, Wilfrid Bertram is ‘a collectivist, a Fourrierist, an Engelist, a Tolstoi-ist’ (as well as vegetarian); he is also bombastic, foolish, and hypocritical.53 This characterization, however satirical, hints that in the 1890s Ouida would have approached any alliance with English Tolstoyans reluctantly. At the conclusion of this story, Ouida does grant Bertram the chance to pursue a communal farm along socialistic lines. This contained experiment allows Bertram to live out his ideals without compromising them and co-exists with the wider society without overtly upsetting it. Such communes, often centered on cooperative stores and workshops, were being undertaken in the 1890s and 1900s by New Lifers in rural Essex, the Cotswolds and Yorkshire.54 Ouida’s handling of the novella’s denouement reflects her ambivalence towards them and their embrace of the simple life. Not wholly remote from such social circles supporting Tolstoy, Ouida remained, both geographically and politically, on the fringe of the fringe. Ouida, A Village Commune (Whitefish, MT: Kessenger, 2004), p. 23. Diana Maltz, ‘Ouida, “Impossible” Socialism, and the Appeal of Anarchism’,

50 51

Anglistica-Pisana, 6.1/2 (2009), 99–106. 52 On the romance of the guardsman in Ouida’s early novels, see the chapter ‘Ouida: Romantic Exchange’ in Pamela K. Gilbert, Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels: Reading, Contagion, and Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 140–81, and Talia Shaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 126. Also see my analysis of the peasant rebel Adone Alba of Ouida’s The Waters of Edera in ‘Ouida, ‘Impossible’ Socialism.’ 53 Ouida, An Altruist and Four Essays (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1897), p. 14. 54 Dennis Hardy, Utopian England: Community Experiments, 1900–1945 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 175–82; Manton, ‘The Fellowship’, 299.

Fig. 8.1

Critical Studies, title page, Fisher Unwin, 1900

Chapter 8

Opinionated Ouida Lyn Pykett

Although best known to modern readers as a writer of popular or middle-brow fiction, Ouida also sought to intervene in contemporary political and social debates in the more serious periodical press. Like many, perhaps most, Victorian middle-brow fiction writers she had a long association with periodicals. However, it was not until the late 1870s, during her lengthy sojourn in Italy, that Ouida became known for her ‘views and opinions’ (as she titled her 1895 collection of essays), when she began to publish essays and reviews and became a regular writer of letters to newspapers and periodicals. Between her first short essay in the Whitehall Review in April 1878 and June 1906, Ouida published over 60 on a wide range of topics in English, American and – occasionally – Italian periodicals. In the Gentleman’s Magazine, the North American Review, the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary Review, the Nineteenth Century and Oscar Wilde’s The Woman’s World, Ouida lectured the world in general on the nature of modernity, the vulgarity of modern life and literature, the evils of science, war and conscription, on animal rights, the folly and inevitability of female suffrage and the causes of the rise of anarchism and socialism, varying her ‘topics and emphases’, as Andrew King has noted, ‘according to the periodical she was writing for’.1 Demonstrating that new authority which Jane Jordan has detected in Ouida’s writings following her move to Italy,2 she lectured her English compatriots on the decline of their literature and the misrepresentations of their press, in the latter case focusing on the British press’s misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Italy and Italian politics. This essay will touch on all of these aspects of Ouida’s journalism, beginning with what W.T. Stead described as Ouida’s ‘trenchant and unsparing’ criticisms of ‘the

1 Andrew King, ‘The Sympathetic Individualist: Ouida’s Late Work and Politics’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39 (2011), 563–79, p. 566. King argues, persuasively, that notwithstanding Ouida’s deft shifting of topic and emphasis in line with her understanding of the nature of the editorial policies and readership of the different periodicals for which she wrote, it is, nevertheless, possible to detect a ‘coherent political standpoint in her late journalism’ (p. 564). King describes this standpoint as a distinctive variant of that fin-desiècle individualism which was itself a conservative development of the philosophical radicalism of the 1840s and 1850s. 2 Jane Jordan, ‘The Peasant and the Picturesque in Ouida’s Italy’, in The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics and Art, eds Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa and Paul Vita (Milan: Polimetrica, 2009), p. 62.

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kingdom which to European Liberals represents the most brilliant triumph of the idea of nationality’.3 Italy Ouida began her journalistic critique of modern Italy following the publication of her novel, A Village Commune (1881). First, she wrote a lengthy letter to the Contemporary Review robustly defending her representation of Italian life against the charges of its reviewer – Mary Calverley, another Italian resident – that it was both biased and misinformed, that Ouida was ignorant of the Italian language and knew little about local politics, that the Communes were not as bad as she suggested and that Italian civil servants had improved considerably of late.4 In July 1882, still (at least implicitly) rebutting Calverley’s review of A Village Commune, but also self-consciously addressing the concerns of ‘these days, when the possession and the participation of land is so prominent a subject of discussion’,5 Ouida published an essay in the Gentleman’s Magazine in which she sought to correct English misconceptions of ‘The System of Mezzadria’, an Italian sharecropping system in which peasants held and worked (but did not own) land whose fruits they shared with the landowner (the padrone) who exercised a pervasive control over their lives. The ‘possession and participation of land’ was a particularly prominent subject of discussion in Britain in the early 1880s because of the activities of the Irish National Land League (established in 1879) and Charles Stewart Parnell’s parliamentary campaigns to secure and improve the rights of tenant farmers. Ostensibly a response to having seen ‘some clever Liberal journal’ write of mezzadria ‘as though it were a sort of communism’, the essay is typically authoritative and assertive in tone, as Ouida seeks to correct what she claims are the erroneous suppositions of ‘the journalists of the English press’ by demonstrating, with numerous examples from her own experience and the experiences of people she knows – particularly the peasants in her own part of Tuscany – that the system is, ‘in point of fact’, one of absolute authority on the landowner’s side and of docile submission on the peasant’s; standing between the two, ‘the curse of the rural communities’ is the ‘rapacious’ fattore (the steward or bailiff) whose ‘peculation’ and theft is permitted by ‘the indolence and the amiability of Italian gentlemen’ and gives rise to a form of compensatory cheating 3 W.T. Stead, Editorial Note to ‘An Impeachment of Modern Italy’, Review of Reviews, 18 (September 1898), 245–54, p. 245. 4 Calverley’s ‘Ouida’s Knowledge of Italian Life’ appeared in Contemporary Review, 40 (October 1881), 564–9. Ouida’s response appeared in the next issue (November 1881), 841–2. Calverley defends her attack on what she claims are Ouida’s exaggerations, misrepresentations and looseness of argument on the grounds that Ouida’s novel claims to be ‘more than a work of imagination [... and] professes to be a picture of real life’ (p. 564). 5 Ouida, ‘The System of Mezzadria’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 253 (July 1882), 105–11, p. 105.

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by the peasant (‘The System’, p. 105, p. 109, p. 110). Ouida’s demonization of the fattore both results from and facilitates her tendency to romanticize the Italian peasant, which Calverley noted in her Contemporary Review article. Another tendency noted by Calverley – a tendency towards looseness of argument and inconsistency – is also evident in the way in which Ouida combines sympathy for the peasant and outrage at his exploitation with an affirmation that, ‘despite its many abuses’, the mezzadria’s ‘recognition of the supreme right of the owner of the soil over the soil appears to me much juster and much healthier than the communistic clamour for the cultivator thereof to push out and supersede the possessor’ (‘System’, p. 110). In November 1886, Ouida began what was to become a concerted attack on what she saw as modern Italian vandalism in ‘Cities of Italy’, which appeared in the North American Review. Like many of Ouida’s periodical pieces, this is a review-like essay, whose pre-text is a piece by Hermann Grimm which had appeared in the Deutsche Rantzau on 1 March 1886, and which Ouida described as ‘a powerful appeal to the scholars and artists of Europe against the Italian destruction of Rome’.6 The rhetorical padding by paraphrase in this essay is an early example of the practice of repetition and recycling which Ouida, like other periodical essayists seeking to fulfil a word quota,7 was to deploy in her periodical essays on all subjects. ‘Cities of Italy’ deplores what Ouida argues is the deleterious effect of Italian unification and independence on its art and history. She laments losses that are ‘scarcely to be measured … so immense are they in their extent, so incessant in their exercise’, noting that no-one could have foreseen ‘the daily destruction, by hordes of foreign workmen, of [Italy’s] treasures of art and its landmarks of history’, nor how the Italian people ‘would become abject slaves of a municipal despotism and of a barbarous civic greed’. Ouida defends her right to express these views and the right of Europe to interfere in the Italians’ spoliation of their cities on the grounds of Europe’s role – ‘its aid and acquiescence’ – in bringing the kingdom of Italy into existence; and also because, she argues, ‘historic Italy, classic Italy, artistic Italy, is a treasure which belongs to the whole world of culture’ (‘Cities’, p. 462, p. 463). The exaggerated and colourful language of both Ouida’s fiction and journalism was often singled out for criticism. Her overblown style and penchant for lists undoubtedly helped her fulfil her word quotas, but her rhetoric is frequently also very effective in conveying her sense of the horrors of modern life. Ouida, ‘Cities of Italy’, North American Review, 143 (November 1886), 462–77,

6

p. 462.

7 Ouida’s correspondence with various editors and publishers (Parrish Collection, Princeton University) indicates that in the late 1880s she regularly received about £40 for a pair of short essays from S.S. McClure’s American newspaper syndicate. However, she could realize considerably more for full-length journal articles. She asked for £100 for the 4,000 word essay ‘Paolo and Francesca’ which appeared in the February 1895 issue of Cosmopolitan (see letter from Ouida to unidentified agent or editor, 6 October 1894, Parrish Collection, Princeton University).

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Ouida positions herself as speaking on behalf of the world of culture and speaking out against the degeneration of Italian taste which she links to that ‘utter deadness of soul which has come on the Italians as a nation’ (‘Cities’, p. 464), a specific example of the general ‘vulgarity’ which, for Ouida, is characteristic of modernity. In Ouida’s vision, Rome is laid low not by an invading army but by its own municipality selling off land and buildings to foreign speculators: ‘the tender silence of the tombs’ has been replaced by ‘the stench of engines, the dust of shattered bricks, the scream of steam whistles, the mounds of rubbish, … long lines of houses raised in frantic haste on malarious soil … all is dirt, noise, confusion, hideousness, crowding, clamor, avarice’ (‘Cities’, p. 467). There are similarly colourful passages on the destruction of Venice, drawn from Emile de Lavaleye’s Lettres d’Italie (1884), and an attack on Florence for its plan to destroy parts of the historic city supposedly in the interest of new houses and hygiene. Ouida makes no attempt to endear herself to her Italian neighbours when she proclaims that the ‘dirt of Italian cities is not due to the age or shape of the streets’ but ‘to the filthy personal habits of the people. … They love dirt; water never touches their bodies all the year round, and never touches even their faces or hands in winter’ (‘Cities’, p. 474). Ouida’s most concentrated journalistic address on the subject of Italy to her English audience occurred in the pages of the Fortnightly Review in the mid to late 1890s. She had begun to publish in the Fortnightly at the beginning of 1892 during the editorship of Frank Harris, a liberal in politics, but most of her contributions on Italian life and letters came after Harris’s replacement (in 1894) by W.L. Courtney, who ensured that the periodical maintained a broad coverage of political and literary topics. Outspoken, and often angry in tone, Ouida’s Fortnightly essays demonstrate a clear understanding of the periodical’s readership and its editorial requirements, allowing both her readers and her editors ‘to enjoy her fury in the knowledge that it was only an extreme version of what they already felt and knew’.8 ‘The Legislation of Fear’ (October 1894), the first of her Italian essays for the Fortnightly, is in part a liberal – even libertarian – critique of the reactionary response of European governments to the social unrest of 1894. Ouida espouses ‘what seems to be a supreme truth, that the happiness of humanity can only be secured by the liberty of the individual’. She expresses ‘great anxiety’ that the liberty of Europeans ‘is everywhere suffering from the return to reaction of their governments’ who are replacing ‘legislation by justice’ with ‘legislation by fear’,9 and explores – quite sympathetically – the forms and causes of the threat of anarchy. The latter is described as a strange phenomenon which ‘ought to be examined with the most calm and open-minded philosophy, instead of being judged by the screams of frightened crowds and the coarse invective of such politicians as Crispi’ (‘Legislation’, p. 552). Francesco Crispi, the Sicilian republican and King, ‘Sympathetic Individualist’, p. 564. Ouida, ‘The Legislation of Fear’, Fortnightly Review, 56 (October 1894), 552–61,

8 9

p. 552.

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former revolutionary who was Prime Minister of a unified Italy between 1887 and 1891 and again between 1893 and 1896, is one of the main targets of this essay’s invective – as he is of most of her Italian essays of the 1890s – as Ouida adopts a stance of informing an English population which has been misled by its politicians and press about the realities of Italian politics. In 1898 W.L. Alden was to attack Ouida in the pages of the New York Times for her inaccurate and ‘wild assertions’ about Crispi and the Italian government’s treatment of political prisoners, claiming that ‘the person who signs herself “Ouida” is probably the last person whom the average man would dream of accepting as an authority on political questions’.10 Yet it is clear that much of Ouida’s authority on the questions of Italian politics was acquired or borrowed from the numerous books, periodicals and newspapers in which she immersed herself in the long periods of solitude in Italy. For example, ‘The Crispi Dictatorship’ is essentially an essay-like review of Giovanni Ferrero’s La Reazione, which had appeared in 1894, and from which she quotes and paraphrases extensively. Ouida greatly admired Ferrero’s ‘striking abilities’ and often cited his political writings with approval, but was entirely lacking in sympathy for his ‘narrow socialist temper’.11 ‘The Crispi Dictatorship’ aims to interrogate why the English press, usually noted for its sympathy ‘with any struggle for liberty in what they call “abroad”’, has betrayed its principles, and, ‘for some reason, concealed from view, for the sake of Francesco Crispi, … lends the whole strength of its patronage to the most immoral and the most cruel of all the political adventurers of the century’.12 She resumed this theme in ‘The Italian Awakening’ in April 1896, when she attributes the English press’s ‘vehemence of partisanship’ for Crispi to its belief that the Italian alliance he offered would be of great benefit to England. On the contrary, Ouida argues, a strong Italian–English alliance would produce a much stronger coalition between Russia, France, Turkey and possibly – after a time – Germany.13 The campaign against Crispi and Crispinism is continued in an essay on the Marquis di Rudini, the Sicilian nobleman who succeeded Crispi as Prime Minister in 1891 (until 1892) and 1896 (until 1898). Notwithstanding Ouida’s admiration for Rudini’s ‘generous, humane, and liberal mind’,14 the essay deplores his failure to stamp out Crispinism and renews her attack on the use of what she calls the ‘absurd’ press laws and on the domicilio coatto, a public security law (introduced 10 W.L. Alden, ‘London Literary Letter’, New York Times (Saturday Review of Books and Art), 24 December 1898. 11 Ouida, ‘The Misgovernment of Italy’, Fortnightly Review, 63 (June 1898), 957–76, p. 671. 12 Ouida, ‘The Crispi Dictatorship’, Contemporary Review, 68 (August 1895), 241–55, p. 253. 13 Ouida, ‘The Italian Awakening’, Fortnightly Review, 59 (April 1896), 541–6, p. 544. 14 Ouida, ‘The Marquis di Rudini and Italian Politics’, Fortnightly Review, 60 (September 1896), 350–62, p. 352.

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in 1863 and made permanent by Crispi in 1866) which could exile offenders to places within Italy remote from their original home. This essay also notes that the revolutionary impulse in Europe – which, in Ouida’s view is most pronounced in Italy and in Italian women – is stoked by repression and by war; here Ouida takes up the theme of the pointlessness of the aggressive Italian war against Abyssinia – and of imperial wars more generally – upon which she was to elaborate in several essays towards the turn of the century. In the Rudini essay, Ouida argues that Italy is not simply misgoverned, but rather that the country is structurally ungovernable: ‘the government, be it under whom it may, strips and ruins the people; it creates a hopeless and desperate misery out of a cheerful and patient industry; it turns good citizens and laborious peasants into beggars and delinquents’ (‘Marquis’, p. 359). This opinion is elaborated further in ‘The Twentieth Italian Parliament’, which gives Ouida’s opinions – with anecdotal illustrations from her neighbours and servants – on why Italians don’t vote. The reason, apparently, is that all governments are the same and that the Italian populace is in thrall to the impiegati, those on the government payroll.15 The misgovernment of Italy is also the theme of an essay of that title in the Fortnightly Review (June 1898), which provides another very good example of Ouida’s recycling techniques. As well as reusing elements of her own 1886 North American Review essay on ‘Cities of Italy’, it recycles the ideas of Pompeo Molmenti, President of the Venetian Academy; it is packed, even padded out, with Ouida’s translations of extensive quotations from Molmenti, under the guise of bringing his work to the attention of the English. ‘The Misgovernment of Italy’ also makes extensive use of Théodore de Wyzewa’s ‘L’Agonie de Venise’, a review (of Pompeo Molmenti’s recent Venezia) which had appeared in Revue des Deux Mondes in 1897, as well as recycling its own arguments through repetition. Like many of Ouida’s periodical essays in the 1890s, ‘The Misgovernment of Italy’, is a tirade against the decay of literature and the degeneration of modern urban life. Deploying her characteristic rhetoric of repetition and accretion, it repeatedly invokes and attacks the greed of the ‘contractors and concessionaires, and jerry-builders, and bureaucratic thieves, and foreign speculators … engineers, builders … town councillors, bankers, usurers, speculators, chairmen, shareholders, and directors of companies’, and attributes the disfigurement of Venice and other Italian cities to ‘the men of greed, the English and American tradesmen, the Hebrew speculators, the German Hucksters, the cosmopolitan inflators of bubble companies’, and so on (‘Misgovernment’, pp. 964, 967). Interestingly, Ouida uses terms which anticipate late twentieth-century discussion of the vampire when she describes these men of greed as ‘the modern representatives of the ghouls and vampires of old-world romance’ (‘Misgovernment’, p. 961). ‘The Misgovernment of Italy’ concludes with a postscript noting that since its completion ‘violent insurrection in two-thirds of Italy … has been violently 15 Ouida, ‘The Twentieth Italian Parliament’, Fortnightly Review, 61 (May 1897), 679–86.

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repressed’, something which could have been foreseen, Ouida asserts, ‘by anyone who has accurately estimated the tendencies of public life and thought during the last ten years’ (‘Misgovernment’, p. 976), that is to say by Ouida herself. Ouida is referring here to the Fatti di maggio in 1898. The ‘military despotism’ which resulted from those May events is the subject of an essay commissioned by W.T. Stead for the Review of Reviews. ‘An Impeachment of Modern Italy’, which appeared in September 1898, summarizes the complaints of many of Ouida’s earlier Italian essays: ‘the Italian people are perpetually tormented by [political and bureaucratic] interference: by exaction, by eviction, by both Imperial and local spoliation, by the tyrannies and insolence of a brutal police, by the multitudinous irritations of a torturing administration, which apes in infinitesimal things the tyrannies and oppressions of the greater government’ (‘Impeachment’, p. 246).16 Like many of the earlier pieces, this essay is illustrated by anecdotal examples of the bureaucratic tyrannies endured by people Ouida knew, and it reprises some of her recurrent preoccupations, in particular her anti-Crispinism, the English press’s ‘vassalage’ to Crispi and the evils of the domicilio coatto. Ouida’s last essay on an Italian topic for the Fortnightly consists largely of quotations from Vifredo Pareto’s Liberté Economique d’Italie, designed to show that the exiled professor shares Ouida’s desire to see Italy ‘freed from systems which form a cruel and continual tyranny’. The Pareto essay begins with an assertion which could stand as an epigraph for Ouida’s Italian essays: I have often expressed my own views in the pages of this Review upon Italian politics, art, and national questions … I, in all that I have said, have exaggerated in nothing, and have but faithfully described the situation of a country which has, ever since 1887, been the prey of unscrupulous politicians and of venal journalists.17

Vulgarity, Modernity and Degeneration Ouida’s critique of the state of modern Italy is part of a wider critique of the degeneration of modern life in which she developed her own version of the ideas propounded by Cesare Lombroso (the Italian social Darwinist and theorist of anthropological criminology) and Max Nordau (whose Degeneration first appeared in German in 1892, and in an English translation in 1895). This can be seen clearly in the following example from ‘The Misgovernment of Italy’:

Having succeeded in getting Ouida to reprise her by now well-known views on Italy, Stead went on to publish a highly critical response of those views in the next issue (see Giovanni Dalla Vecchia, ‘A reply to Ouida’s Impeachment of Modern Italy’, Review of Reviews, 18, 362–5). 17 Ouida, ‘Vilfredo Pareto’, Fortnightly Review, 65 (March 1898), 475–85, p. 475. 16

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Every year modern habits become more unlovely, and modern sensibilities more blunted. … The characteristic passion of the hour is greed; greed of possession, desire of acquisition, and passion for ostentation. Trade has become an octopus embracing the whole world … Even the deformity of their own bodies awakens no aversion in the modern public; if it did, the bicycle would never have been in demand. (‘Misgovernment’, p. 970)

Echoing Lombroso, Ouida describes one of her pervasive preoccupations: the debased modern type, with its snigger of conceit, its cynical grin, its criminal’s jaw, its cutaneous eruptions, its dull and insolent eyes, its stunted growth, and its breath foul with nicotine and chemical drinks, such as the modern schools, the modern scientists and the modern dram-shops have made it. (‘Misgovernment’, p. 673)

In an essay for the North American Review at the beginning of the 1890s, she claimed that ‘[t]he intellect of mankind is every year forsaking it more utterly’ – a situation which she attributed to: the ‘ever-increasing luxury … and the ever increasing materialism of all kinds of life into which mechanical labor enters’.18 For Ouida, modern life is characterized pre-eminently by its ‘Vulgarity’, a subject on which she wrote at length, again in the pages of the North American Review. Vulgarity is, for Ouida, the modern vice, which she associates with the social pretension and class mobility of ‘this restless, rude and gregarious century’,19 not to mention her other bêtes noires, railways and excursion crowds. Ouida is particularly disgusted by the intrusiveness of the press into private lives and by the concept of ‘personalities’. For her, vulgarity is the antithesis of ‘simplicity’, a value that modern life and modern education20 (which creates ‘egotism’ and ‘an intense self-consciousness’) are most calculated to destroy. Science, photography and exclusive urban living all tend to vulgarity, as does Socialism, which is defined as vulgar and sordid, dreary and dull. Vulgarity is also a symptom of the anarchy of modern culture, the subject of one of her earliest contributions the Fortnightly, ‘The Sins of Society’. In this essay Ouida decries the ‘ugly habits … ugly clothes [and] ugly hurry-skurry’21 of the modern age, gives a litany of examples of the sins Ouida, ‘Has Christianity Failed?’, North American Review, 152 (February 1891), 221–33, p. 221. 19 Ouida, ‘Vulgarity’, North American Review, 144 (February 1887), 148–60, p. 159. 20 This negative view of education is consistent with Ouida’s stated preference for the illiteracy of the Italian peasantry in her letter to the Contemporary Review in November 1881, written in response to Mary Calverley’s review of A Village Commune: ‘Reading and writing, even if the unmixed boon and legal birthright of man that a certain school declares them to be, may be too dearly bought, and are not worth the sacrifice of homely contentment with a humble lot’. Indeed, in Italy, ‘the newly acquired power of reading is chiefly used for the perusal of inflammatory and communistic newspapers’ (p. 841). 21 Ouida, ‘The Sins of Society’, Fortnightly Review, 52 (December 1892), 780–97, p. 783. 18

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which she finds offensive, ranging from the modern failure to cope with silence, the cultures of display, gambling and the crowd, society weddings, and publicity, that ‘vampire of curiosity’22 that invades the privacy of the man or woman of genius. Socialism, which ought to be the solution to the sins of society, is accused of being part of the problem, because its ‘triumph would be the reign of universal ugliness, sameness, and commonness’ (‘Sins’, p. 797). The pièce de résistance of Ouida’s degenerationist rhetoric is probably her essay in The Nineteenth Century on ‘The Ugliness of Modern Life’, which announces the death of beauty and accuses its destroyers: the ‘beauty of the earth is dying’, Ouida proclaims, and the death blows are being dealt by ‘frightful new buildings and factory chimneys’.23 The symptoms of this strange disease of modern life are the ‘apathy, despondency and cynical indifference which are largely characteristic of the modern temper’. Ouida claims that both beauty and the ability to appreciate and value it are being destroyed: by modern education; by petty bureaucracy and by-laws; by the ugly machines of modern life such as the sewing machine, machine-made furniture, automobiles and bicycles (Ouida, who often uses cycling as a symptom of the loss of aesthetic feeling, proclaims that ‘no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it’ [‘Ugliness’, p. 216]). The other forces destroying beauty include architectural crimes, such as the sacrifice of great houses and gardens to speculative mania, the Hausmanization of city streets and the uprooting of embedded communities in the name of hygiene (but actually in the interests of speculation), all of which lead to a degradation of the concept of home, as does the restlessness of modern town and city living. Instead, Ouida looks back to a golden, medieval age, when poor drainage was offset by colour and beauty; when there were ‘no miles on miles of dreary suburban waste … no pert, aggressive modern villas … no underground railway stations and subways; no hissing steam, no grinding or shrieking cable trams; no hell of factory smoke and jerry-builders’. When she looks to the present she finds a modern life, which, ‘shorn of freedom, interest and beauty … finds vent [for its cooped up feverishness] in commercial gambling … from the Stock Exchange to the tontine, from the foreign loan to the suburban handicap – and existence is but one gigantic lottery’ (‘Ugliness’, pp. 222–3). It is startling to see how closely some of the concerns as well as the rhetoric of ‘The Ugliness of Modern Life’ resemble our own: the violence of modern cities, ‘death … made grotesque by modern science’, and most significantly, the attacks on the effects of industrial pollution and the concern for the environment. Sounding at times like a cross between a trade unionist and an environmental campaigner, Ouida fulminates against the causes and consequences of industrial pollution and the growth of technology and industry. She speculates that the 22 Ouida, ‘A New View of Shelley’, North American Review, 150 (February 1890), 246–62, p. 250. 23 Ouida, ‘The Ugliness of Modern Life’, Nineteenth Century (January 1896), reprinted in Critical Studies, pp. 210–38, p. 212.

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offspring of the working class ‘must be fatally affected by the poisonous trades, the sickening effluvia, the deadly conditions amongst which modern commerce requires its slaves to spend their lives’, and asserts that ‘even the country fields are sullied by chemicals and stink of sulphates, phosphates and human excrements’, that agriculture ‘tends to become a mere manufacture, like any other, surrounded by the din of pistons, the fumes of vapour, the jar of wheels’, that the fumes of ‘aluminium works will … emit hydrofluoric acid gas which will destroy all the vegetation on Loch Ness for miles’ (‘Ugliness’, pp. 226, 231), and that the ‘modern mania’ for ‘meddling with water’ is leading to the spoiling of European lakes and rivers – citing the example of the damming of the Rhone. Ouida calls attention to what we now describe as the exporting of pollution and the extension of England’s carbon footprint, urging her readers to: imagine the effect on the atmosphere of the continual crossing and recrossing on ocean routes of tens of thousands of … steamships yearly, or of the perpetual belching of … fumes from the innumerable factory shafts annually increased in every part of what is called the civilised world. To India, from England alone, the export of machines and other material for factory erection has been at the enormous rate of £70,000 monthly! (‘Ugliness’, p. 233)

She proclaims that ‘the “Light of Asia” is forced to grow foul and dark and sickly, and its radiant suns to be shrouded in pestilent fog in order that the British Gradgrind may put by his 200 per cent and fold his hands complacently on his rotund belly’ (‘Ugliness’, p. 233),24 and bemoans the fact that it is well nigh impossible to get money ‘for the preservation of anything, but millions flow like water when there is any scheme of destruction’ (‘Ugliness’, p. 231). In this essay, as in others, Ouida denounces commerce and militarism as the two ruling forces of the modern world, invoking Socialism as a possible answer to the ills of the modern world, only to dismiss it: ‘socialism, which has the future of the world in its hands, will probably be unable to abolish war, and will certainly not care for beauty or seek to preserve it. The reconstruction of society which socialism contemplates will not be a state of things in which the interests of either nature or art will be cherished’ (‘Ugliness’, p. 234). Ouida equates collectivism with colourlessness, and concludes with a burst of Carlylean rhetoric: 24 The ‘disillusionment with imperial politics’ in Ouida’s fiction of the 1890s has been linked to the preoccupations of fin-de-siècle decadence; see Natalie Schroeder and Shari Hodges Holt, Ouida the Phenomenon: Evolving Social, Political, and Gender Concerns in her Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), p. 236. In fact, elements of antiimperialism is evident from the 1860s. For example, in these words of the desert chief in Under Two Flags: ‘To rifle a caravan is a crime, though to steal a continent is glory. ... But the locust-swarms that devour the land are the money-eaters, the petty despots, the bribetakers, the men who wring gold out of infamy, who traffic in tyrannies, who plunder under official seals, who curse Algiers with avarice, with fraud, with routine, with the hell-spawn of civilization. It is the “Bureaucratie,” as your tongue phrases it, that is the spoiler and oppressor of the soil’ (Under Two Flags: a Story of the Household and the Desert [London: Chapman & Hall, 1867], 2, pp. 73, 74).

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What shall it profit the world to put a girdle round its loins in forty minutes when it shall have become a desert of stone, a wilderness of streets, a treeless waste, … where man shall have destroyed all life except his own, and can hear no echo of his heart’s pulsation save in the throb of an iron piston. The engine tearing through the disembowelled mountain, the iron and steel houses towering against a polluted sky, the huge cylinders generating electricity and gas, the network of wires cutting across the poisoned air, the overgrown cities spreading like scurvy, devouring every green thing like locusts; haste instead of leisure, Neurasthenia instead of health, mania instead of sanity, egotism and terror instead of courage and generosity, these are the gifts which the modern mind creates for the world. It can chemically imitate every kind of food and drink, it can artificially produce every form of disease and suffering, it can carry death in a needle and annihilation in an odour, it can cross an ocean in five days, it can imprison the human voice in a box, it can make a dead man speak from a paper cylinder, it can transmit thoughts over hundreds of miles of wire, it can turn a handle and discharge scores of death-dealing tubes at one moment as easily as a child can play a tune on a barrel organ … all this it can do, and much more. But it cannot give back to the earth, or to the soul, ‘the sweet wild freshness of morning.’ (‘Ugliness’, pp. 236–7)

The death of beauty is also a preoccupation of essays on the decay of literature – especially English fiction – in which Ouida, writing from Italy, adds her voice to English debates on realism and naturalism, on the adverse influence on literature of the owners and users of circulating libraries and on the artificial prolongation of the life of the three-decker. In the earliest of these essays, ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’, Ouida regrets the passing of the high point of the English novel, which, at its best, ‘touched social and political problems … in a manner which induced thought in the thoughtless; … brought some knowledge of culture, some sympathy with pain, some insight into higher natures, to large classes of persons who could have been reached by no other means’.25 Ouida opines that ‘national decadence’ has been accompanied by a ‘redundant and mediocre literature’ which is ‘enormous in quantity’ but ‘contemptible in quality’: There is an endless outpouring from the printing-presses of second-rate, feeble, and verbose fiction, which is accompanied by a stream of so-called criticism as verbose, feeble and second-rate as itself; and in this vast invertebrate, jelly-like mass the reader searches in vain for any knowledge of human nature, any trace of scholarship, any presence of original thought. (‘Tendencies’, p. 214)

Notwithstanding her own rhetoric of repetition, redundancy and verbiage are, in Ouida’s view, among the most conspicuous errors of modern literature.26 Like George Moore, Ouida attributes the decay of fiction to: the fact that novel writing has become a mere trade feeding the ‘hasty, undigested reading’ of Ouida, ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’, North American Review, 141 (September 1885), 213–25, p. 221. 26 See also Ouida’s ‘The Genius of D’Annunzio’, Fortnightly Review, 61 (September 1896), 350–62. 25

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subscribers to circulating libraries; serial publication; the spinning out of a thin thread of interest encouraged by the three-decker; the inefficiency of criticism; and the hypocrisy, puritanism and ‘insular and conventional views of life’ of English writers. The theme is taken up again in ‘Literature and the English Book Trade’, which also condemns over-production and accuses publishers of being responsible for ‘all the trash and twaddle poured from the English and American printingpresses’, aided and abetted by the circulating libraries’ ‘demand for rubbish in the shape of books’, and ‘the press, which almost invariably reviews this rubbish with patronising amiability when it ought, if it did its duty, not even mention its existence’.27 For Ouida, the decay of writing goes hand in hand with the decay of reading – and she is particularly fierce in her condemnation of skipping as the basic reading mode of the English. Notwithstanding her attacks on the decay of the modern novel, Ouida makes a spirited defence of the novel as a form in her essay on Charles Victor Cherbuliez’s Le Secret du Précepteur. This essay opens with a quotation from a speech by Sir John Lubbock (given at the opening of a new free library in Lambeth a few weeks earlier), which, Ouida argued, demonstrated all too clearly that the English regard fiction ‘as on a par with chromo-lithography, the use of the Kodak, and tight-rope dancing’.28 Ouida uses Sir John’s statement that he should be very sorry to undervalue novels to launch a defence of fiction modelled on Austen’s in Northanger Abbey: Sweet and gracious condescension! He would be sorry to ‘undervalue’ Boccaccio, Cervantes, Guerazzi, Théophile Gautier, Mérimée, Victor Hugo, Thackeray, Walter Scott, Fielding, Octave Feuillet, Georges Sand and Bulwer Lytton! Admirable benevolence! A treatise on the ways of ants and bees must, of course rank as an infinitely higher work than a mere study of the manners, characters, and passions of mankind. … A fine novel contains intellectual qualities of the highest kind, and combines in itself the widest effects and the most delicate minutiae of creative art. (‘Le Secret’, p. 830)

The creator of a fine novel must possess: not only imagination but wit, not only wit but scholarship, not only scholarship but fancy, not only fancy but discrimination, observation, knowledge of the passions, sympathy with the most opposite temperaments, the power to call up character from the void … and … the mastery of an exquisite subtlety, force and eloquence in language. (‘Le Secret’, p. 830)

The malign effects of the decay of literature are as nothing, however, compared to the evils of ‘the twin despotisms: the scientific and the military’,29 which formed Ouida, ‘Literature and the English Book Trade’, North American Review, 160 (February 1895), 157–65, pp. 157, 158. 28 Ouida, ‘Le Secret Du Précepteur’, Fortnightly Review, 53 (June 1893), 829–35, p. 829. 29 Ouida, ‘Georges Darien’, Fortnightly Review, 62 (September 1897), 341–57, p. 341. 27

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the burden of so many of Ouida’s essays, including those on Italy. The failure of ‘what is called civilisation, or progress, to put an end to war’ is the subject of ‘War’, one of the essays she published in Wilde’s The Woman’s World in the late 80s. Elaborating on the vision of Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race, this diatribe anticipates the twentieth-century doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction by suggesting that ‘the scientific development of war’ makes it increasingly likely ‘that the same kind of invention which has produced the telephone and the phonograph may produce an instrument, or series of instruments, of power so instantaneous and scope so vast, that armies will be unable to exist by reason of their mutual powers of annihilation’.30 As there is no form of government that is immune to militarism and war, Ouida asserts, ‘the only chance for the general disarmament of the world will be in the possibility that the game will become so costly that the most reckless of players will be unable to risk the stakes’ (‘War’, p. 173). Ouida was also a fierce critic of conscription, a practice against which she railed in several of her essays on Italy. In ‘War’, she described ‘the half-idle, halfbrutalised conscript’ as ‘a ruined workman and a ripened revolutionist’ (p. 172), and she continued the theme in a feisty essay on the subject in the Fortnightly in 1892. ‘Conscription’, written in response to the publication of an interview in which Lord Wolseley had declared himself ‘in favour of enforced and universal military service’, counters his claims about the benefits of conscription for character-building, discipline, obedience and fitness by drawing on the superior understanding she had acquired by living in Italy, a country with enforced military service. Wolseley’s ‘rhapsody’ she claimed, ‘could only be uttered by one who has never studied the effects of conscription on a population.’ Ouida argues that conscription does not, as Wolseley claims, develop discipline, it merely enforces it as obedience – a quality which the contrarian Ouida does not admire: ‘All the finest freedoms of mankind have been obtained, not by obedient, but by utterly disobedient persons’ who had the courage enough ‘to disobey if disobedience be needed by honour, justice, or wisdom’.31 Ouida’s hatred of war is inextricably connected with her animus against science: ‘war has been almost incessant since the empire of science’.32 Attacks on the ascendancy of science are scattered throughout her essays, beginning with ‘Some Fallacies of Science’ (North American Review, February 1886). Written in response to Sir Lyon Playfair’s address to the British Association at Aberdeen in the early autumn of 1885, this essay takes issue with the propensity of scientists to address themselves only to other scientists and to sweep aside all independent criticism. Ouida sets herself up to fight on the side of the humanities, casting scientists in the role of creators of bogeymen with which to scare the populace. Ouida, ‘War’, The Woman’s World, 2 (1889), 171–3, p. 171. Ouida, ‘Conscription’, Fortnightly Review, 52 (August 1892), 211–16, pp. 211,

30 31

212.

32 Ouida, ‘Some Fallacies of Science’, North American Review, 142 (February 1886), 139–52, p. 150.

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Thus she questions how far the ‘real or imaginary creation of the microbe’ by the men of science ‘has invested cholera with a fanciful horror so new and hideous in the popular mind’, and ‘how many nervous illnesses … [and] imaginary diseases, have sprung into existence since science, popularized, attracted the attention of mankind to the mechanism of its own construction’? (‘Some Fallacies’, p. 142). She ridicules Playfair’s rejoicing in the fact that the machines in one Boston shoe factory can do the work of 30,000 shoemakers in Paris, claiming that there is something ‘delusional … fanatical and biased’ in his ‘curious statement that hand-work, with its scope for originality and individual interest is slavery, whilst the work of factories, mechanical, monotonous, and done in ugly chambers and unwholesome air, is liberty’ (‘Some Fallacies’, pp. 143–4). She applies the human happiness test to such inventions of modern science as the electric telegraph, arguing that it creates a world of telegrams and anger, internecine quarrels and rash speculations in political, commercial and private life: The telegraph, like nearly all the inventions of the modern age, tends to shorten time but to harass it, to make it possible to do much more in an hour, a day, a year, than was done of old, but to make it impossible to do anything without agitation, brain-pressure and hurry. (‘Some Fallacies’, p. 155)

The centre piece of the essay is a highly wrought section of fairly purple prose painting a dystopian picture of the pollution of air and water brought about by the inventions of science: were we to awake an Athenian of the time of Phydias from his mausoleum, and take him … into Blackpool or Belfast … Zurich or Munich, he would ask us, in stupefaction, under what curse of the gods had the earth fallen that mankind should dwell in such hideous clamor, such sooty darkness, such foul stenches, such defiled and imprisoned air. He would survey the begrimed toilers of the mills and looms, the pallid women, the stunted offspring, the long lines of hideous houses, the soil ankle-deep with cinder dust, the skies a pall of lurid smoke, the country scorched and blackened and accursed … He would behold the dwarfed trees dying under the fume of poisonous gases, the clear river changed to a slimy, crawling, stinking, putrid flow of filth; the … air loaded with the stench of chemicals and the vapors of engine-belched steam. He would stand amidst this hell … and if at his ears any prated of science, he would smile in their faces and say: ‘If these be the fruits of Science let me rather dwell with the forest beast and the untaught barbarian.’ [N]o doubt science can study air in her spectrum, and analyze water in her retorts; she can tell why the green tree dies in the evil gas … and give you a learned treatise on the calcined dust which chokes up your lungs; but she cannot make the green tree live … nor the rivers she has poisoned run clean. (‘Some Fallacies’, pp. 146–7)

Ouida’s anti-science stance is both a cause and consequence of her espousal of animal rights. Moreover, if science is one of the causes of the ‘restlessness and

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feverishness’33 of modern life, then one of the more notable symptoms – in Ouida’s view – is the agitation for women’s rights. In the last decade of the twentieth century, the best known of all of Ouida’s periodical essays were her pronouncements on this agitation in the pages of the North American Review – her September 1886 essay on the female suffrage, and, more famously, her May 1894 essay on ‘The New Woman’, a response to Sarah Grand’s polemic ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, which had appeared in the March issue of the same periodical. These are two of the most ostensibly reactionary and anti-democratic pieces that Ouida wrote.34 However, as is often the case, Ouida’s ‘conservatism is formulated through a radical rhetoric’,35 which privileges the personal and the aesthetic over the political. Ouida’s opposition to female suffrage is an extension of her rather haughty attitude to the value of the ‘voting urn’ and her scepticism about the extension of the suffrage more generally. This champion of individualism and genius regards it as absurd that ‘the sage has no more electoral power than the dunce’. As she puts it in ‘Female Suffrage’: ‘Rationally, logically political power ought to be allotted in proportion to the stake which each voter possesses in the country’. She is equally scornful of the rationale for female suffrage provided by the democratic Americans, by English conservatives (who think women are inherently conservative) and by ‘female agitators’ (who think women will espouse progressive causes). Ouida sees all of this as opportunist politics which is typical of the age. She dismantles the arguments of those who want to give limited rights to women, asserting that ‘women of wit and genius must always be indifferent’ to the opportunity of sharing the voting rights of their male servants (‘Female Suffrage’, pp. 290–91, p. 293). In all of her essays, Ouida clearly positions herself with the women of wit and genius. She claims for herself equality with the best of men, even if, in general, women are mentally and morally inferior to men: ‘Women on an average have little sense of justice’, they ‘are more tyrannical and self-absorbed than men’, they lack ‘toleration and calmness in judgement’ (‘Female Suffrage, p. 295), and they are more inclined to be prejudiced and narrow in their views. If given political power, women would be inclined to meddling legislation. Nevertheless, Ouida sees female suffrage as being as inevitable as democracy, socialism and modern pessimism:

Ouida, ‘Female Suffrage’, North American Review, 143 (September 1886), 290–306, p. 290. 34 Intriguingly, publication of Ouida’s two-part, pro-feminist essay ‘The Woman Problem’ was delayed until following her death. See ‘The Woman Problem I. Shall Women Vote?: A Study of Feminine Unrest – Its causes and Its Remedies’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (January–June, 1909), 586–92, and ‘The Woman Problem II. Love Versus Avarice: A Frank Analysis of the Causes Which Make for Social Evil’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (January–June, 1909), 712–17. 35 Pamela Gilbert, ‘Ouida and the Other New Woman’, in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Diane Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 170–88, p. 170. 33

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Men who think at all, see … how unreal all religions [are], how fictitious the laws of marriage, how mutable the laws of property, how appalling the future of the world … And they are, therefore, in that mood which makes them willing to try anything new, even votes for women. It is this which will allow women to ‘snatch from the nerveless hand of the sick man those legal and legislative rights which she covets (‘Female Suffrage’, p. 305).

As is well known, the later essay on the New Woman is more worldly, adopting a pose of weary and lofty disdain for the ‘persistent clamor’ for change, and bracketing together those two ‘Ws’ – the Workingman and the Woman as ‘two unmitigated bores’.36 Ouida responds to Sarah Grand’s ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’ de haut en bas, finding it both ‘deliciously comical and ‘pompous’ (‘New Woman’, p. 611). She is aesthetically affronted by the New Woman, at least as she is represented in the press: ‘why cannot this orator learn to gesticulate and learn to dress’. However, Ouida’s rhetoric is anti-clamourist, rather than anti-woman. She refuses to see women as victims and urges them to seize the opportunities that they have: Woman, whether new or old, has immense fields of culture untilled, immense areas of influence wholly neglected. She does almost nothing with the resources she possesses, because her whole energy is concentrated on desiring and demanding those she has not. She can write and print anything she chooses; and she scarcely ever takes the pains to acquire correct grammar or elegance of style before wasting ink and paper. She can paint and model any subjects she chooses, but she imprisons herself in men’s ateliers to endeavour to steal their technique and their methods, and thus loses any originality she might possess. … Her precept and example in the treatment of the animal creation might be of infinite use in mitigating the hideous tyranny of humanity over them, but [instead] she wears dead birds … hunts … and … shoots. (‘New Woman’, p. 613)

Ouida has no patience with those who claim that men have condemned women to obscurity and a lack of education. Obscurity is ‘the lot of the majority, whether male or female’, and education should not be confused with a college curriculum, which would ‘have done nothing to improve [the] rich and beautiful mind’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and ‘might have done much to debase it’ (‘New Woman’, p. 615). In a curious way she anticipates Virginia Woolf by arguing that both men and women of genius constitute a ‘third sex which is above the laws of the multitude’ (‘New Woman’, p. 617). Ouida certainly anticipated Woolf by having a room of her own in which to read and write and from which to fire off her broadsides to the periodical and newspaper press; indeed, at times during her career, she had numerous rooms of her own. As Talia Schaffer noted in Forgotten Female Aesthetes, Ouida was an anti-feminist who ‘lived out precisely the New Woman platform – she was single, self-supporting, discussed sex, proposed to men, Ouida, ‘The New Woman’, North American Review, 158 (May 1894), 610–19,

36

p. 610.

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led political activism against vivisection … and wrote eloquently about marital abuse and the marriage question generally in her fiction’;37 and, one might add, wrote eloquently about all manner of modern subjects in her essays for periodicals. Conclusion Ouida’s essays for the periodical press are opinionated, repetitive, often condescending, and sometimes inconsistent and self-contradictory. One might disagree with Ouida’s judgements, but they are not, as some of her critics claimed, simply ignorant or ill-informed. Her periodical essays are responsive and reactive, but they are also energetically engaged with the topics of the day and with other writers and speakers on those topics. Ouida’s tone is assertive and frequently hectoring. Her essays sometimes read as if they ought to have been written in green ink and signed ‘Scandalized of Scandicci’. She lectures her readers, but she does so through a process of dialogue and debate with those writers and speechmakers whose writings and speeches form the pre-texts for her own texts. She also generated dialogue and debate. I have already noted published comments by W.L. Alden and W.T. Stead on her Italian essays. In August 1888 Charles Morley wrote to the painter J.A.M. Whistler to ask him to ‘look at “Ouida”, & having digested her … write … a short critique upon the “ugliness” of London’ for the Pall Mall Gazette.38 Whistler, who had just returned from his honeymoon, appears to have declined the invitation, but William Morris did provide Morley with a piece for the Pall Mall which began: ‘Ouida’s article on the ugliness of London does … call for remarks from those who care at all for the real pleasure of life for themselves and others’.39 Ouida’s writing, as she acknowledged herself in her Appendix to A Village Commune, has ‘alternately been accused of a reactionary conservatism and a dangerous socialism, so that I may, without presumption, claim to be impartial; I love conservatism when it means the preservation of beautiful things; I love revolution when it means the destruction of vile ones. What I despise in the pseudo liberalism of the age is that it has become only the tyranny of narrow minds vested under high-sounding phrases, and the deification of a policeman’.40 Ouida’s periodical essays are broadsides fired at the tyranny of narrow minds in the US, Britain and Italy.

37 Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 15. 38 Card in Glasgow University Library’s Whistler archive, MS Whistler P26. 39 William Morris, ‘Ugly London’, Pall Mall Gazette, 4 September 1888, pp. 1–2, p. 1. 40 Ouida, A Village Commune (London: Chatto & Windus, 1881), p. 377.

Fig. 9.1

Pascarello, cover, trans. ‘Diana D’Arco’ [Enrico Montazio] (Firenze: Banco d’Annunzi Commissioni e Rappreseentanze), vol. 1 of 3, 1 lira octavo paperback

Chapter 9

Politicizing the Aesthetic: Ouida’s Transnational Critique of Modernity Richard Ambrosini

In The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, Talia Schaffer argues that Ouida not only ‘popularized the glamorous world of aesthetic fashion and decoration’, but also ‘standardized the genre of the aesthetic novel’ later developed by such writers as George Meredith, Oscar Wilde, and J.K. Huysman. In tracing the ‘evolution of the female aesthetic subject’, Schaffer focuses on Ouida’s treatment of gender and commodities, while acknowledging the importance of examining the development of her ‘social conscience [and] regional fiction’, and in particular her ‘“Italian” novels’.1 What require investigation are the overt political overtones acquired by Ouida’s aestheticism. Read in conjunction with Ouida’s essays on Italy in English and those on Britain in Italian, the ‘Italian’ corpus can enrich and complicate the picture of her entire literary output. From her location on (or near) the periphery of Europe, in a country she had recreated as a model of imperiled beauty, the bestselling author, it will be argued, found the required terms for critiquing a modernity that she read as a process of cultural homogenization which exported all that she despised in an imperial Britain that she had come to believe had lost its soul. Ouida was proud of the transnational synthesis which had allowed her to discover in Italy the political potentials of the aestheticism she had herself heralded in English literature. Signs of this pride can be found, expressed in her typical epigrammatic language, in a review of a collection of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s poems she wrote expressly for her collection Critical Studies (1900).2 The article is largely dedicated to lengthy quotations of the most anti-imperialist verses from Satan Absolved: A Victorian Mystery, a long poem not included in the collection but which through her review was guaranteed to reach a far wider readership than Blunt could have ever imagined.3 Satan Absolved had been excluded from the volume by its editor, Blunt’s fellow-poet, the archconservative William Ernest Henley, who had pronounced it ‘too “damnable”’.4 Ouida dedicates most of her review to a vibrant critique of each Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 122, 124. 2 The Poetry of Wilfred Blunt Selected and Arranged by W. E. Henley and George Wyndham (London: William Heinemann, 1898). 3 Satan Absolved: A Victorian Mystery was published in 1899 by both Bodley Head and John Lane. 4 Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (London: Tauris Parke, 2007), p. 429. 1

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one of Henley’s editorial choices as well as of most of his introduction: and in particular she rejects a claim, made by the ‘Ancient Pistol’ of the fin de siècle literary scene,5 which she construes as implying that ‘an Englishman must be judged by what he writes of England’. Her reply is both scathing and pained: ‘“Country” is but a restricted boundary for whoever has the vision which sees beyond the ordinary range of men. To the true poet his native land lies wherever what is beautiful can be beloved, or that which is sorrowful needs solace.’6 There could be no more fitting epitome of Ouida’s literary and political achievement in Italy. Blunt was the closest thing to a soulmate Ouida had in contemporary Britain. As Luisa Villa notes, his militant writings about Egypt contributed ‘significantly to the connection of the metropolitan centre to its Mediterranean peripheries between the 1880s and 1910s’7 – an accomplishment that parallels Ouida’s. A latter-day Lord Byron (whose granddaughter he had married) Blunt was that rara avis, an English aristocrat and an anti-imperialist, and as such embodied an ideal male figure who synthesizes the values of Ouida’s early fiction and her later essays. Not long after the review appeared, Blunt paid Ouida a visit in April 1900. As he recalled in his diary, ‘I had been prepared, by the violence of some of her writings and by what I had just heard of her [in Florence], to find her somewhat loud and masculine’; instead, ‘she proved the reverse of this’: Her conversation is good, intellectual, but not affected or the talk of a bluestocking; it gives one the impression of a woman who has thought out her ideas and has the courage still of her opinions. We talked about the inhumanity of modern Europe, and especially of modern England, and the rage for slaughter which is its chief feature. We talked also about Italy and [the ex Italian PM Francesco] Crispi, who is her bête noire here, as [the Colonial Secretary Joseph] Chamberlain is in England. She talks English perfectly.8

Blunt’s fears that the champion of his apocalyptic indictment of British imperialism would turn out to fulfill the New Woman cliché only make more significant the complex artistic and existential trajectory that led Ouida to become the kind of person, and writer, who could shame this sort of sexist projection. 5 John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800 (1969) (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1991), p. 166. Ouida’s correspondence with Blunt refers to her dislike of Henley: on 8 May 1899 she admitted that she didn’t like Henley’s preface to Blunt’s poems, and in a further undated letter remarked, ‘How you can tolerate Henley is to me incomprehensible’ (Blunt MS, Ouida File 1,West Sussex Record Office, Chichester). 6 Ouida, ‘Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’, in Critical Studies (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), 143–64, pp. 146–7. 7 Luisa Villa, ‘A Footnote to Literary History: Modernism, Imperialism, and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’, in Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediterranean, eds Caroline Patey, Giovanni Cianci and Francesca Cuojati (Milan: Cisalpino, 2006), 263–77, p. 265. 8 Elizabeth Lee, Ouida: A Memoir (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1914), pp. 170–171. All references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text.

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Not the least of Blunt’s surprises was the odd discovery that Ouida spoke perfect English. This may suggest that when he referred to ‘the violence of some her writings’, he had in mind the bilingual voice through which she had attacked British and Italian domestic and foreign policies first in English-language papers throughout the late 1890s and, over the previous months, most fiercely in three articles published in the most prestigious and progressive Italian journal of the time, Nuova Antologia. The vantage point provided by these essays allows a retrospective view on the writer’s entire oeuvre which problematizes the culturally-determined, sometimes stereotypical representation of Italy to be found in her ‘Italian’ novels – even in the most political of them, A Village Commune (1881). 9 These stereotypes were replicated until the end of her life in her fiction, which makes all the more noteworthy her ability to transcend, in her later essays, the preconceptions she had brought with her years before. Viewed in this perspective, Ouida appears to be a Janus-like figure whose fiction and polemic point in opposite directions. As Raymond Grew observes in an essay on the Italian Risorgimento, clichés ‘have content’ because ‘myths and stereotypes are also a form of historical evidence’.10 Ouida’s texts are rich with specific cultural information because she did not perpetuate generic ‘English’ stereotypes about an abstract ‘Italy’:11 rather, she dramatized the ad hoc clichés through which her contemporary English expatriates reprimanded childish Italians while also creating an imaginary ‘land of lands’ (Robert Browning, ‘De Gustibus ‑’, l. 20) through which they could criticize Britain and thus justify and ennoble their self-imposed exile. In the memoirs, letters and literary works left behind by that cultivated elite among lateVictorian holidaymakers who chose Italy as their destination, and in certain cases place of residence, John Pemble finds two recurrent and complementary motifs: the representation of Britain as an industrialized nightmare plagued by an excess of democracy and an omnipresent, brutish working class, and the recurring praise 9 Further evidence, this, of how her clichés are no laughing matter, pace Henry James. In a 1875 review in of her second ‘Italian’ novel, Signa, James, another claimant to the role of chief Anglo-Saxon expert on Italy, remarked that in Ouida’s portrait of the Tuscan countryside ‘local colour is poured out in bushels, it is laid on with a trowel’. ‘There is hardly a sentence’, he went on, ‘in all its high-flown length that means anything very particular. … Ouida has quite brought to perfection the art of seeming to mean something’; but in the end, it is all ‘hopelessly wild and crazy’, The Nation, 1 July 1875; reprinted in Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: The Library of America, 1984), pp. 1194–5. 10 Raymond Grew, ‘Catholicism and the Risorgimento’, in Studies in Modern Italian History: From the Risorgimento to the Republici, ed. Frank J. Coppa (New York, 1986), p. 50. Quoted in Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society and National Unification (London: Routledge, 1994), 81–2. 11 For a comparison of Ouida’s early representations of Italy with those of her contemporaries Alice Comyns Carr and Janet Ross, see Jane Jordan, ‘The Peasant and the Picturesque in Ouida’s Italy’, in The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics and Art, eds Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa and Paul Vita (Milan: Polimetrica, 2009), pp. 61–79.

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of the Italian ‘poor’, who aside from being so much sweeter and better looking added to the picturesqueness of a pre-industrial nation which had to be preserved in its pastoral state.12 Ouida repackaged these particular stereotypes in her ‘Italian’ fiction, but her Italy is not simply a projection of anxieties she shared with other Victorian expatriates; it was also, and perhaps mostly, the necessary backdrop for the fanciful identity she assumed once she arrived in Florence in November 1871, and especially after she moved, three years later, into Villa Farinola. The evidence gathered from many of her acquaintances by her first biographer, Elizabeth Lee, is consistent in suggesting that ‘As soon as she was settled in the villa, Ouida assumed all the airs and graces of a great lady, and showed all the caprices that are usually supposed to belong to genius. She set out to organize her existence in accordance with this estimation of herself and of what was due to so magnificent an abode’ (Lee, p. 81). Ouida’s literary earnings enabled her to acquire the props required to live in an Italy of her imagination where she could fulfil the dreams she had previously woven into her silver fork novels. As one of Lee’s sources recalled: ‘The first time I saw Ouida … she was in her own apartment before an open fireplace, standing on a white bearskin dressed in a white flowing garment with wide open sleeves – in short, like a heroine of romance.’ ‘It is said of her by those who knew her at this period in Florence’, Lee goes on, implacably: that she always dressed to fit the position of the heroine she was depicting at the time – white muslin if a peasant girl, white satin if a great lady. It was also her custom to reproduce in her books the clothes of the people she met. Surrounded by her great white Maremma dogs, occupied with her books and her painting, she seemed to pass her life in a sort of novel of her own. She wove a web of romance round herself and her belongings, and only showed interest in those things and people that could in some way be woven into it. (Lee, p. 83)

Into this ‘web of romance’ she wove statesmen, ambassadors and any aristocrat flitting through Florence, but never the writers and artists living there, people like John Singer Sargent, Paul Bourget, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Vernon Lee, Mary Robinson (Lee, pp. 67–8). In reading her five novels with Italian peasant protagonists – Pascarèl (1873), Signa (1875), Ariadnê (1877), A Village Commune (1881) and In Maremma (1882) – one must bear in mind that they were written at a time when her exalted self-image was finding ever more confirmation, each one reinforcing the reality of that image’s tapestried backdrop: Italy. The high point was her tête-à-tête with the Italian queen, in the royal palace in Rome, in March 1881. Her already occasionally unmanageable ego must have made her feel that the fanciful Italy she had created had to obey her every desire – as if indeed she were the monarch of 12 John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 237, pp. 128–35.

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all she surveyed. This is when, as Lee writes, her ‘antagonism to the laws of the land in which she lived, and to those whose duty it was to execute them’, started to have ‘far-reaching consequences’. On the least provocation, ‘Ouida would appeal to justice’, and if a muzzling order for dogs was issued, if her dogs frightened people or bit children, if her servants misbehaved themselves, if a tradesman in her opinion overcharged her, she went to law. She invariably lost the case, and not only had to pay the sum in dispute but heavy lawyers’ bills in addition. Sometimes even she would call in another lawyer to fight the one she had previously employed. It was such lawsuits on the top of her reckless personal extravagance that crippled her resources and ultimately brought her to ruin. (Lee, p. 111)

It is fascinating how seriously she took herself. Thanks to Lee’s spiteful informants, we know that Ouida was ‘obsessed with an idea of her extraordinary influence in European politics, and she used to talk seriously of the men she should select for ambassadors at different Courts’ (Lee, p. 108). In the Italy of her creation she must have felt it was easier; after fulminating against some modernizing vandalism perpetrated by a city council in a letter to the Times, she confided to a friend in Britain: ‘I suspect the sovereigns here are irritated at my Times letters.’ Some ‘well-wishers’ tried to restrain her, but to their pleading she haughtily replied: ‘I have always occupied myself with politics at intervals – once in London I wrote what threw a Bill out of the Commons, and you know how rare it is for a writer to turn the votes in England. But’, she added ominously, ‘I think they don’t here in the least understand my power’ (Lee, pp. 107–8). So little indeed that a few months later the sovereigns singled her out among the foreign community in Florence and invited her to a reception, in which the King – she claimed – invited her to visit them in Rome (Lee, pp. 118–19). Little did Ouida know how much Italians adore foreigners who by badmouthing them contribute to their national pastime: self-derision.13 Indeed, as an obituary by Angelo Flavio Guidi in the Nuova Antologia recalled, Ouida remained for a long time ‘one of most popular writers in Italy’ even though her readers would find in her ‘always that special English characteristic that makes every Albion’s son firmly believe he is an envoy both of God the Father and of Apollo sent to watch over the fate of Italy, entrusted with the special mission of coming to rule in our country, giving us lessons of humanity, public decency and … aesthetics’. 13 Perry Anderson comments on this typical Italian cultural trait in ‘A Land without Prejudice’, London Review of Books, 24.6 (21 March 2006), online edition, last accessed 6 July 2011: ‘In no other nation is the vocabulary of self-derision so multiple and so frequent in use. Italietta for the trifling levity of the country; italico – once favoured by Fascist bombast – now synonymous with vain posturing and underhand cynicism; bitterest of all, italiota as the badge of an invincible cretinism. It is true that these are terms of public parlance, rather than of popular speech. But, as the familiar contempt of the phrase all’italiana (divorce, etc.) testifies, the lack of self-esteem they express is widespread. The good opinion of others remains foreign to the Italians themselves’.

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She was forgiven such insufferable censoriousness, he surmises, because ‘in her advice to Italians Ouida speaks in good faith and is listening to her tender and good heart’.14 The eighth novel she wrote in Florence, A Village Commune, represents Ouida’s most determined attempt to carry out this ‘special mission’. A hybrid text which purports to be a sociological and political essay rendered in fictional terms, the novel can be, at times, infuriating, as when she declares: ‘If I ruled Italy, I would ship nine-tenths of the impiegati [civil servants] and the pensioners to New Guinea.’15 And yet it is also a serious piece of writing which validates her claim that she had tried to narrate ‘the fates of some very poor people; the sort of people that the world sometimes will deign to read about if Georges Sand or George Eliot write of them, but who, outside a story-book, are absolutely uninteresting and insignificant’ (Village Commune, p. 12). In the eyes of Ruggero Bonghi, Liberal MP and former Minister of Public Education, she succeeded, since he suggested that the novel should be distributed to every Italian legislator.16 The crucial move underlying the entire book’s rhetoric is her self-presentation as an expert on matters Italian – a claim on which other expatriates begged to differ.17 To this end, she affixed a 20-page long appendix to the text, which sets the tone of two decades of essay writing on the Bel Paese: ‘I know the Italian people well; I mean the poor, the labouring people’, she declares, ‘They are but little understood by foreigners, even by foreign residents’ (Village Commune, p. 354). To ensure that her readers pay attention to such otherwise uninteresting creatures, it was necessary to induce in them a certain degree of sympathy: I cannot think to make you care for these people as I care for them; I, who know that they see their radiant sun forever through a mist of tears, who know that their hard-won bread is eaten with the gall of fear and of oppression tainting the sour crust, who know that their little children tremble in their town alleys and country lanes, and fly with their hunted dog from the armed myrmidon of a relentless and ignominious law; I cannot think to make you suffer for them as I do, but still I think you will not refuse to feel some pity for them and some pain. (Village Commune, p. 366)

In fact the most effective move toward securing her readers’ tears was her describing poor Italians as ‘very docile’ (Village Commune, p. 354): that adjective alone was sufficient to make them far more deserving than English workmen or than those archetypal figures of ungratefulness, the Irish. Angelo Flavio Guidi, ‘Ouida’, Nuova Antologia, 217 (16 February 1908), 649–56, pp. 649, 654–5. My translation. 15 Ouida, A Village Commune (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882), p. 353. All references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text. 16 Mario Praz, ‘Ouida’ (1938), in Motivi e figure (Turin: Einaudi, 1945), p. 91. 17 See the ridicule Mary Calverley poured over her in ‘Ouida’s Knowledge of Italian Life’, Contemporary Review, 40 (October 1881), 564–9. 14

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In a letter written shortly before the novel’s publication, Ouida vented her fury at the shooting of a Co. Mayo landlord, Lord Mountmorris, in September 1880: ‘Ireland’, she wrote, ‘is in a frightful state; it wants military law. … I would have shot every second man on Mountmorris estates unless they had given up the murderer. But Parliament is only a clumsy governing machine after all, and unhappily seldom represents the national will.’ And then adds: ‘I am now printing a story of the Italian people, who suffer far more than the Irish and say nothing’ (Lee, pp. 108–9). All the more urgent, then, that their grievances be voiced by the only friend they could count on. Within the text itself we find an even more explicit comparison, in an extraordinary passage which reveals why, by playing on her bourgeois readers’ dislike for English workmen, she can pass off as ‘realistic’ her fictional representation of the Italian people. ‘Compare the mechanic of Wakefield or Blackburn’, she writes in the appendix, addressing directly her readers, with the pall of black soot hung forever between him and the sun, and his superficial repetitions of Darwin or Bradlaugh urged as evidence of an enlightened mind; compare his automatic hideous toil, his hard hatred of all classes save his own, his dwelling one amidst rows of a thousand similar, his wilderness of dark, foulscented streets, his stench of smoke, his talk of agnosticism and equality narrow as the routine of his life, his shallow sophisms, his club, his strikes, his tommyshop; compare him and these with the Italian labourer of the Lucchese hills, or the Santa Fiora forests, or the Val d’Arno farms, rising to see the glorious sky glow like a summer rose, dwelling in his wide, stout, stone-built house old as the trees around him, … at eventide resting to see the youths and maidens dance, and listen to the old pastoral love songs sung to the thrum of the guitar, or the story of the Gerusalemme Liberata passed down by word of mouth from sire to son. (Village Commune, p. 368)

No wonder British readers trusted Ouida as an expert on things Italian, even when she opines: ‘Italy is essentially a pastoral country. Those who would turn it into a manufacturing one would be as those who should turn a tabernacle of Giotto’s into a breeding-hutch of swine’ (Village Commune, p. 367). And this in a novel published the same year as that masterpiece of European naturalism, Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia. Another self-styled expert on Italy, John Ruskin, proved to be the perfect foil for Ouida’s sentimentalizing on ‘docile’ Italian victims, and hailed the novel as no less than a ‘photographic story’ from which ‘those who do not know Italy may best learn, if they can bear the grief of learning it’, everything about ‘the mountain peasantry of Tuscany and Romagna’, who in the year of grace 1883, according to his lights, are the most oppressed, most afflicted ‘order of gracious and blessed creatures – God’s own poor, who have not yet received their consolation’ (cit. in Lee, p. 110). A Village Commune is presented as an indictment of Italian bureaucracy, especially at a local level. If this is so, one wonders why the arch-villain who takes such sadistic pleasure in ruining a family of peasants (sweet rustic lovers

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included) should be an uprooted Jew, Gaspardo Nellemane – literally, ‘In-thehands’ – who is in cahoots with ‘a cousin who was a money changer in the town of Alessandria; a shrewd “Ebreo”, with greasy clothes and a sallow skin, who will in all probability end as a baron and a banker’ (Village Commune, p. 30). In her antiSemitic campaigning Ouida goes to the extent of relating personal anecdotes and marshalling unreliable statistics: first she reports how ‘a working man [said] to me the other day’ that the state ‘sells everything else to the Hebrews, but it takes good care to keep the lottery itself’, and later informs the reader that ‘There are 40,000 Jews in Italy, and to them are going all the old estates, all the old palaces, and all the old heirlooms’. She also comes up with a ‘war-cry of the Italy of to-day’: ‘Italy for the Italians! yes; with the municipal extortions made a thing of the past like the Inquisition, and the Jew usurer and the English and American speculator, denied the soil they covet and pollute’ (Village Commune, pp. 364–9). Ouida’s public tears for the Tuscan peasants reflect also her private concern that the Italian state’s oppressive policies may endanger ‘the fortunes of us poor rentiers’ (Lee, p. 121) by igniting a popular revolt. These two equally sincere feelings explain the appeal she makes at the end of the first chapter: ‘We in Italy are all of us afraid of socialism, we who have anything to lose; and yet we let the syndics with their secretaries, conciliators, and chancellors sow it broadcast in dragon’s teeth of petty injustices, and petty cruelties, that soon or late will spring up armed men, hydraheaded and torch in hand!’ (Village Commune, p. 23). And so her call for justice is cast in a rhetoric that she knew would resonate with her British readers’ fears. Towards the end of the 1880s, Ouida’s ideal world began to fall apart – crucially, in 1888, after she was forcibly evicted from Villa Farinola, and in 1893, following the death of her mother. Her short stories and novels were increasingly less marketable, and required long negotiations, and in the 1890s she published relatively few stories; in the main, these appeared in British newspapers through Tillotson’s syndicate. It was during this period that, as Lee notes, she ‘turned her attention to criticism, both literary and political, and began to write for the serious reviews, chiefly for the Fortnightly, the Nineteenth Century, and the North American Review’ (Lee, pp. 161–2). In 1895, she collected 19 of these pieces in Views and Opinions. In some of these, like ‘The Blind Guides of Italy’18 and ‘Cities of Italy’ (Views and Opinions, pp. 87–109), develop the aesthetic environmentalism she had voiced in the letters to The Times in which she had denounced the ills caused by modernisation to the Italian città d’arte. Others, instead, mark an evolution in her treatment of the country, as she uses Italian social and political phenomena as case studies of what could be future negative developments across Europe. Her sympathy with the causes of anarchism and nihilism is attested by ‘The Legislation of Fear’, in which she criticizes as illiberal the antiterrorism laws passed in several European states – notably the lois scélérates in France – after a 18 Ouida, ‘Blind Guides to Italy’, in Views and Opinions (London: Methuen, 1895), pp. 160–87. All references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text.

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spate of deadly attacks against heads of state and high functionaries. The bulk of the essay, however, is dedicated to reporting cases of politically motivated police malpractice in Italy. Perhaps unfairly she describes these cases as an effect of the 1890 Zanardelli penal code, which at the time was one of the most liberal and progressive in Europe, as it abolished the death penalty and introduced the right to strike; what Ouida was attacking, rather, was the government’s abuse of what were supposed to be emergency police powers – such as internal exile (domicilio coatto) originally established in 1863 to fight brigands – to punish political dissidents. Her customary denunciations of Italian bureaucracy transcend her personal obsessions: hidden away in a corner of Tuscany, Ouida comments on events in Italy to warn of phenomena that sooner or later will affect other European nations. As is made clear in the title of another of these essays – ‘The State as an Immoral Factor’ (Views and Opinions, pp. 347–67) – insights she drew from her day to day experiences were evolving into a rejection of any form of state control. So effective her denunciation would prove to be that it made her into an icon for American anarchists and individualist feminists like Emma Goldman and Clara Dixon Davidson.19 Further evidence of how Italy provided her with materials useful for warning British readers of the perils of statism emerges in her essay ‘Conscription’ (Views and Opinions, pp. 34–44). Episodes of brutality against conscripts in the Italian and German army are marshaled in a rebuttal of the recent proposal to introduce conscription in Britain made by field marshal Garnet Wolseley. Little more than ten years before, in 1882, Ouida had elected Wolseley as her greatest modern hero when he had led the expeditionary force sent to repress the Urabi Revolt in Egypt. At the time she had written that ‘this superb swift course of victory’ was worthy of ‘the campaigns of Alexander’, and later gave expression to her feelings in a poem published in The Times September 5, 1882, compared to which Rudyard Kipling’s imperial anthems sound like a paean to multiculturalism: Great England put her armour by, and stretch’d Her stately limbs to slumber in the sun. The nations, seeing then how long she slept,

Emma Goldman, ‘Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,’ in Anarchism and Other Essays (Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York, 1920), writes: ‘Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty. Thus Ouida is right when she maintains…’ and proceeds to quote from ‘The State as Immoral Factor’, Views and Opinions, p. 361, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ goldman/Writings/Anarchism/anarchism.html (accessed 22 February 2012). Clara Dixon Davidson, ‘Relations Between Parents and Children’, Liberty, 3 September, 1892, writes: ‘The church, also, uses its power to perpetuate its power. And to these twin leeches, as “Ouida” has aptly designated them, to these self-interested robbers and murderers, are the tender minds of babies entrusted for education,’ http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/insteadof-a-book/relations-between-parents-and-children (accessed 22 February 2012). 19

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Commun’d together, and in whispers said : ‘Lo! She is old and tired; let us steal The crown from off her brows. She will not know!’ … And crying ‘She is old!’ and meting out Her lands amongst themselves, and parcelling Her honour. Then, swift as lightning flashes From blue skies, her glance of scorn fell on them. And they crouch’d, like wolves that are o’ermastered. England stretch’d out her hand, and touch’d the world – England arose, and spake, and calmly said: ‘Nay! I am mistress still’. (Lee, pp. 119–20)

By the end of the 1890s, the author of these lines had become one of the most radical anti-imperialist voices in the English-speaking world. Among the essays included in Views and Opinions, the most vibrant and forceful are two she had originally published in spring 1894, ‘The Italy of To-day’ (pp. 145–59) and ‘L’Uomo Fatale’ (pp. 187–203),20 in which Ouida paints an Italy in the iron grip of the Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi. One of the most complex and forceful politicians in Italian history, Crispi started out, like Mussolini, as a firebrand (in his case, Garibaldi’s right-hand man) and ended up a reactionary. There were plenty of reasons for criticizing him, but perhaps because at that point in her life Ouida had cut herself off from society, choosing to live in complete isolation in Sant’Alessio, near Lucca, she was relating to readers information garnered from newspaper reports or – as in the case of an 1895 essay, ‘The Crispi Dictatorship’21 – on a book by a socialist historian and sociologist fiercely opposed to Crispi, Guglielmo Ferrero, Cesare Lombroso’s son-in-law. Her treatment of the facts suggests the hand of a romancer painting Italy in thrall to a Montoni-like figure rather than the perspective of a journalist, let alone an historian. What incensed Ouida was the way the British press en bloc presented a positive image of Crispi, lauding him in particular for his strong anti-French policies at a time when France was using the Catholic question to undermine the Italian government and take control of some of Italy’s main economic assets. As essay after essay attests, it was this issue that set Ouida into action: the variables that determined her role as cultural mediator between her two countries had changed. The precipitating factor was Italy’s belated attempt to join the ‘scramble for Africa’ to enhance its national prestige. It was Crispi who led Italy into a disastrous colonial war, using a poorly trained conscript army to carve out an empire in the Horn of Africa after having secured a foothold in Eritrea thanks to a secret agreement with Britain. When, however, Crispi ordered the army to push south in an attempt to conquer Abyssinia, the ill-conceived campaign against the Ethiopian emperor ended in 1895 with the disastrous defeat of Adwa, the worst suffered by a European army in Africa. Adwa marked the end of Crispi, who was forced to resign. ‘L’Uomo Fatale’, Fortnightly Review, 55 (1894), pp. 355–64. Contemporary Review (August 1895), pp. 241–55.

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Shortly afterward, an anonymous contributor to the Fortnightly Review, ‘Ausonius’, penned a defence of Crispi’s policy, arguing that no other Italian prime minister would have furthered British interests to such a degree. In the next issue, Ouida fulminated against ‘Ausonius’ for having candidly admitted that ‘England was the chief cause and counsellor of the African insanity’.22 Such cynicism confirms what she thought all along: if her adopted country got involved in a ‘colonial enterprise for which she is of all nations the least fitted’ (p. 541), it was only because of ‘the Mephistophilian caresses of England’ (p. 546). She chose to respond, therefore, not ‘from the English point of view, but from the Italian’ (p. 541) – by which she meant to act as a spokesperson for the ‘honourable national movement’ against the war (p. 543). This is the ‘Italian Awakening’ of the title, of which the British people were unaware because of ‘the Crispi ring in the English press’ (p. 542): the failure of British journalists to report on the anti-war protests staged from the very first by students and vast sectors of the population left space only to the jingoism shown by a very limited sector of public opinion. As evidence, Ouida translates two moving documents: a proclamation of the students of Bologna and a protest of the women of Pavia who had expressed support for ‘both white men and coloured’, ‘grief for the mourning, without hope, of so many Italian families, and also for the mourning of an alien people which defends its soil and its independence’ (p. 543). This ‘honourable national movement’ had culminated in a demonstration in Rome during which the crowd had frequently shouted ‘Viva Menelik!’ (p. 546) – the Ethiopian emperor who by defeating the Italian army, Ouida wryly concludes, had done a great favour to the Italians. ‘The Italian Awakening’ is a turning point in Ouida’s writings. Italians are no longer praised for their ‘docility’, and her readers’ sympathy is not solicited by appealing to their status as victims. Moreover, she anticipates here the stance she will adopt in later, more pondered essays, in which she voices her concern for the changes wrought by imperialism on the psyche of Europeans: in this sense, the Italian perspective on developments in Britain gives to her writing a new urgency, as she grows increasingly impatient with her compatriots. One can only wonder as to whether the ‘honourable antiwar national movement’ she praised in her April 1896 article influenced her response, the following year, to the Diamond Jubilee which marked the apogee of British jingoism. Even Rudyard Kipling was disgusted, and chastened the national mood by warning his compatriots in ‘Recessional’ of the consequences ‘If, drunk with sight of power, we loose / Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe – Such boastings as the Gentiles use.’23 Ouida went further and composed a vitriolic poem against the queen no one dared to publish. Worse was yet to come. When the second Boer War broke out in Ouida, ‘The Italian Awakening’, Fortnightly Review, 352 (April 1896), 541–6,

22

p.  541.

23 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Recessional’ (1897), ll. 19–21, in Rudyard Kipling, Complete Verse: Definitive Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), p. 327.

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1899, her wrath transcended her spite toward the British establishment and came to include the entire English people.24 Ouida must have been an extraordinary reader of cultural signs, because her indignation was aroused by a change in public mood occurring in Britain in the period that goes from the early 1890s to the Liberal victory in 1906 which was the one moment in British history when, because of the nationalistic fervor aroused by the Boer Wars, imperialist propaganda secured a mass following for empire, at least among the middle-class.25 Ouida was able to identify this transformation, and did all she could to counter it. In February 1900 she confided to Wilfrid Blunt: ‘I do the little I can to make the nation recover its sanity, but it seems a hopeless task’ (Lee, p. 169), but it is somewhat unlikely that this was her real aim, given that in those very same months she was mostly busy denouncing to the Italian intelligentsia what she believed was a barbarization of the British collective psyche in three essays she wrote in Italian and published in Nuova Antologia between September 1899 and April 1900.26 These essays contain her most explicit indictment of what she dislikes about the Britain of her times. The second one, which appeared in December 1899, was a portrait of the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain so ferocious that no British journal dared print its translation. (Eventually, Fisher T. Unwin, who shared Ouida’s political convictions,27 included it in Critical Studies, which went through three editions within the first four months and was to be her last bestseller [Lee, p. 180]). As ‘Joseph Chamberlain’ makes clear, Ouida’s anti-imperialist critique was not founded on a political-economic analysis such as we can find in her contemporary J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902); instead, it grew out of an ethical and aesthetic rejection of what she identified with the social and political perversion of a British ‘high society’ she had conjured up in the past and had recently grown to despise, as she had made clear two years earlier in The Massarenes (1897). It is no coincidence, therefore, that her immediate targets There are interesting parallels to be drawn between Ouida and Olive Schreiner, especially given their campaigns against the Boer War, which the latter denounced in her 1899 pamphlet The South African Question by an English South African. When Schreiner was interned by the British authorities, Ouida protested in a letter to the Daily News. See extracts on the front page of The New York Times, 16 July 1901, http://newspaperarchive. com/the-new-york-times/1901-07-16 (accessed 22 February 2012). 25 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 194–6. 26 ‘Sulla decadenza delle nazioni latine’, Nuova Antologia, 167 (16 September 1899), 193–201; ‘Joseph Chamberlain’, Nuova Antologia, 168 (1 December 1899), 576–85; ‘Imperialismo inglese’, Nuova Antologia, 170 (16 April 1900), 729–42, hereafter referred to as ‘Imperialismo’. 27 Lee, p. 155, ‘Ouida was drawn to [Unwin] not only in the way of business, but also through his well-known sympathy with many of the causes that she had at heart. In addition, his political views coincided with hers … in the South African War and in the estimate of Joseph Chamberlain’. 24

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were the two men who had taken over ‘the aristocratic party’, as she calls the Conservatives: Benjamin Disraeli and, later, the ungentlemanly tradesman Joseph Chamberlain, the man ‘responsible for the financiers’ war in South Africa’ who, aided by ‘the Yellow Press which he inspires’, has made the ‘new hysterical creed of ‘imperialism’ doubtless [gain] an impetus’ (Critical Studies, p. 171). However despicable ‘Birmingham Joe’ may have been, all he had done was vulgarize and brutalize, as she writes, ‘the work of Disraeli’ until the ‘best qualities of the English character are, under his influence, lost in a blatant selfadmiration. Its sense of morality is blunted’ (Critical Studies, p. 177). To explain the effect on British society of a man like Disraeli, a ‘Venetian Jew … so alien and antipathetic to the British nation in blood’, Ouida recurs to the customary set of epidemiological metaphors so common in racialist discourses: ‘Disraeli and his influence have dominated and penetrated English political and social atmospheres, in their highest strata, as a contagious fever enters and reigns in a district’ (p. 175). But her denunciation is not inspired by fears of racial contamination. She does not so much fear for the purity of the English race: her concern is more specifically with the ‘strange phenomenon’ of ‘the Venetian Jew leading by the leash the entire English aristocracies’ (p. 175). How was it possible that the class she had glamorized in her fiction could fall for such an upstart? If Disraeli’s effect on the English body politic is compared to a disease, the means he is accused of using to this end are redolent of black magic: ‘I think’, she writes, ‘that his most potent philter lay in his flattery’ (p. 175). In his case, it wasn’t only the sovereign or the Conservative Party that he flattered, but the nation itself, by playing on a characteristic weakness of the British people: ‘They do not examine critically before committing themselves to embrace a cause or an idea; they can easily be led into any extravagance which humours their national humour’ (p. 175). A superior hack who spoiled romances and speeches alike with his taste for ‘advertisement, for varnish and gilding, and florid decoration’, Disraeli succeeded, through flattery, ‘in innoculating with this taste the English character to which it was naturally alien’ (pp. 175–6). What she means by humouring the British ‘national humour’ becomes clear when she adds: ‘The first sign of the nation having been so inoculated was given when it allowed Disraeli to call the Queen of England the Empress of India, and change an ancient monarchy into a parvenu empire’ (p. 176). According to Ouida, Disraeli played on the British people’s self-image, as if he intuited their desire to consider themselves, collectively, at the head of world empire. The ‘rest followed’: the mania of what is considered aggrandisement has acquired possession of the national life, and has made of a nation, naturally noble and great, a swollen boaster, bawling of its millions, its might, and its superiority. … This alteration in the British temper, which was primarily the work of Disraeli and of the new nobility (chiefly commercial and largely Jewish), which was called into being, prepared the ground for Chamberlain’s Imperialism, a much coarser and greedier thing, without any of the veil of ideality which Disraeli lent to his creeds. (Critical Studies, p. 176)

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Disraeli died in April 1881, as A Village Commune was about to be published. But this essay written 18 years later reveals retrospectively what Ouida had in mind in the novel when she made an obscure Jewish commune secretary like Nellemane a symbol of the forces that were bent on destroying her idealized pastoral Italy. Ouida’s scathing summing up of Victoria’s reign is the part of the essay most explicitly aimed at its Italian readers: The reign of Queen Victoria has been a long succession of wars; few, if any, were either necessary or inevitable. But not one of these has been a war of defence at home; the English citizen and peasant know nothing in their own land of the horrors of war; they have never seen its desolation and its horrors; …therefore they do not know the hideous suffering which they inflict when they let loose, in pride of spirit and lightness of heart and triumphant vanity, the fiends of war upon a distant people and a far-off land. This is the excuse of a large portion of the nation for the present war. (Critical Studies, p. 178)

Ouida’s indictment is sedate compared to what she wrote four months later in her April 1900 essay ‘Imperialismo inglese’ (‘English Imperialism’). Italians are warned against ‘the hysteria, the wrath … that possesses the English mob … which in its intoxication would rush to any danger, any carnage, any ruin in a delirium of vanity and ferocity’ (‘Imperialismo’, pp. 729–30). Italy, she urges, should join other European states ‘against British bullying’ and help form a military coalition to show the British what’s it like to fight against an enemy other than ‘the poor paesani of the Transvaal’ (’Imperialismo’, p. 730). Her diagnosis of the present state of the British people is that colonialism has caused in them a moral and psychological degeneration. Over the past few years, the English nation ‘has been constantly at war with inferior races and has always treated them with an extreme cruelty’, and all these ‘lessons in brutality have accustomed the English people to barbarian acts that in the past would have raised their indignation’ (‘Imperialismo’, p. 732). The problem is no longer simply the Boer Wars but rather ‘the national spirit with which war is considered in England’, as is clear in the appeals to baser passions being made by preachers in ten thousand churches across the country, or the savagery of writers like Swinburne, Kipling and Alfred Austin, the Poet Laureate (‘Imperialismo’, p. 732). As a result of this mass hysteria – largely induced by the perversion of literature perpetrated by a succession of pro-Imperialist writers, from Disraeli to Kipling – the brutality of British colonialism is no longer visited only on other people but on the few dissenting voices of brave British pacifists (such as Kipling’s aunt, Georgiana Burne Jones) – a clear reference to pro-war riots in Margate and Scarborough one month before this essay, the worst in early twentieth-century Britain.28 As Porter writes (Absent-Minded Imperialists, pp. 194–5), troops had to be sent in to put down the pro-war riots that took place in Margate and Scarborough in March 1900; in February and August of the same year, the outbursts of popular bellicosity while celebrating the ‘reliefs’ of Mafeking and Ladysmith, two towns in South Africa, were seen as signs 28

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The final reflection she offers goes well beyond contemporary politics and poses a question which is still with us today: ‘The union of democracy and imperialism can produce as its political offspring only contradictions and confusions’ – which is why it is a matter for concern when a nation is so ‘absorbed in self-admiration’ that it ‘does not fear self-contradiction’ (‘Imperialismo’, p. 736). Now, it is true that her prophecy did not come true. Still, she must be counted among the first to recognize what – as Hannah Arendt was to write 50 years later – was lying ‘under anybody’s nose’, at a time when ‘many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of racism’. A certain degree of ‘moderation in the midst of plain insanity’,29 as Arendt calls it, saved the British empire, during the interwar years, from realizing Ouida’s fears – and she may be left to pass down to history as another Cassandra, like William Pitt, the Elder, who in 1770 had ‘warned of imperialism’s bringing “Asiatic principles of government” to Britain’, or J.A. Hobson, who in 1902 predicted that the ‘inevit­able casualties of imperialism abroad would be “peace, economy, reform, and popular self-government” at home.’30 Still, the question remains a valid one today. At one point in ‘Imperialismo inglese’, she cites her essay on Chamberlain and the question of ‘wherefrom, and how did the English Nation drink the toxin of imperialism (so called, and the word is as extravagant and silly as the thing itself), in what way and through what influence was it possible for imperialism to integrally change a national character’ (‘Imperialismo’, p. 734). Among these causes, she includes ‘the reading of sensational novels’. Of course she claims she means the penny dreadfuls published in ‘the popular press, full of crimes, of butchery, of violence, of barbaric tales’ (‘Imperialismo’, p. 737); however, given the notoriety of her own early fiction, this statement reads, at least in part, as a revealing, self-critical slip of the pen. Evidently, in addressing an Italian audience Ouida felt free to vent opinions that in contemporary Britain would have sounded scandalous.31 And yet, when she had started her collaboration with Nuova Antologia eight months earlier, her aim had not been that of denouncing the Boer War; rather, she was trying to counter of a new, popular imperialism. Kipling’s beloved Aunt Geordie put herself in harm’s way when she responded to the news of the Boers’ surrender by hanging a banner across the front of her house stating ‘We have killed and taken possession’. Her nephew had to rush in to defuse a noisy demonstration outside her home. See Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 466. 29 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950) (New York: Schocken Book, 2004), p. 286. 30 Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, p. 294. 31 The essay was not included in Critical Studies (1900). That same year, however, an English translation, English Imperialism, was brought out in the US by The Tucker Publishing Co., a publishing house owned by the American anarchist Benjamin Tucker. On this formidable figure, see Charles A. Madison, ‘Benjamin R. Tucker: Individualist and Anarchist’, in The New England Quarterly, 16.3 (September 1943), 444–67.

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the Italian elite’s subservience toward British and American societies, which they identified as models of modernity. What provided her with the initial stimulus were two articles by a leading anthropologist, Giuseppe Sergi, in the April and August 1899 issues of Nuova Antologia, titled ‘English and Romans – Causes and Parallelisms of Their Greatness’ and ‘How the Latin Nations Decayed’. In September of that same year, she replied with ‘Sulla decadenza delle nazioni latine’, which in the English translation became ‘The Decadence of Latin Races’. Sergi had introjected the late nineteenth-century anthropologists’ and human biologists’ obsessive racialist classification. Unsurprisingly, given that German and British anthropologists dominated the discipline, the Germanic and AngloSaxon ‘races’ were firmly ensconced at the apex of racial taxonomies based on an identification between racial superiority and technological and military development. Ouida not only confutes such taxonomies: she questions the very idea of a hierarchy among populations based on the values around which the lords of mankind were constructing the model of ‘modernity’ she recognized as a scourge upon humanity. Giving, as he does, ‘to every slight change, the muchused, and much-abused, name of progress’ – which he considers always ‘as an indisputable betterment’ – Sergi, she feels, derives his theory of racial superiority from ‘the models and ideals of modern life’ – Great Britain and the United States; if he can rebuke Italians ‘for remaining immovable’ without suggesting any line of evolution, it is because he starts from the premise that that ‘the Latin races cannot exist under modern conditions unless they form themselves on the models and follow the examples of non-Latin races’ (Critical Studies, pp. 264–5). All the main themes of her writings on Italy since A Village Commune resurface in her rebuttal of Sergi’s theses; but they are given a new significance once she finally addresses the social and political problems of post-1870 Italy as historical phenomena, and not as a violence perpetrated against a country which ought to be preserved outside history, in an eternal condition of minority. This is why her statement ‘That the Italian nation is immovable is not true’ is so significant. Of course – and who wouldn’t – she then qualifies her statement by adding ‘for good or evil it moves’. The problem is in what direction: ‘It is to be feared that the Italian people run the risk of losing their finest instincts, and their most gracious characteristics, through the exaggerated and obsequious imitation of foreign peoples’ (Critical Studies, p. 266). Sergi identified England with the British Empire, which is why Ouida suggests instead to look ‘at the actual situation of Great Britain, setting aside her imperialist swagger, and regarding only facts’. Rather than facts, Ouida offers a dire picture permeated by a considerable Schadenfreude of the geopolitical risks Britain is exposed to at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘Internally, also’, she adds, ‘England is not what she used to be’ – and anticipates the disheartening landscape she will draw more fully four months later in the Chamberlain article: ‘Wealth is now the dominant factor of English social life; and a commerce, wholly unscrupulous, is the sole scope of the tawdry and noisy empire of which Joseph Chamberlain is the standard-bearer’ (Critical Studies, pp. 267–8). Nor does the United States fare

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better, unsurprisingly, given that ‘the national life [there] resembles the English’: the country, as she imagines it, is ‘vain, boastful, hypocritical, cruel, and bellicose’; the ‘contrast between rich and poor is … sharp and terrible. … Lynch law in all its horror reigns over many provinces, and unblushing corruption mounts into the highest places and poisons all the sources of national life’ (Critical Studies, p. 268). What pains her most, therefore, is to read the enthusiastic correspondence from America by one particular Italian modernizer, her anti-Crispi hero Guglielmo Ferrero, who seems ‘transfixed with rapture before the colossal houses which Americans call sky-scrapers, and sees the revelation of a stupendous genius in their passion for what is big, costly, eccentric; nor does he hesitate to compare it with the Florentine and Venetian genius!’ – as if forgetting the difference between the ‘genius of the Italian masters’ and ‘the skill of the American constructors’: the former being ‘never interested, always consecrated to Art and Country’ and the latter ‘labouring for only one God, the venal Mercury of the market-place’ (Critical Studies, pp. 268–9). Ultimately, however, Ouida is not concerned with the past: she is inviting her Italian readers to look at the social and political reality of their country. In rebutting Sergi’s jejune elucubrations, she points out that he ‘forgets, or avoids, to say that in Italy … civil liberty is wanting, and free speech and free acts are forbidden’ (Critical Studies, pp. 274–5). What nonsense it is to speak of racial degeneration while accepting an illiberal regime: ‘It is illogical to condemn a nation for having no virility of character, when the systems under which it is reared, and forced to dwell, [destroy] its manhood, and forbid all independence of thought, speech, and action’ (Critical Studies, p. 276). A conclusion which in its aesthetic and political accuracy shows that Ouida had finally succeeded in becoming ‘the true poet’ of the ‘native land’ in which ‘what is beautiful can be beloved, or that which is sorrowful needs solace’.32

Ouida, ‘Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’, p. 147.

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Appendix 1

Ouida: Novels and Other Volume Form Publications First editions only are noted here, including periodical serialisation if preceding volume form publication. Lippincott and Tauchnitz as well as UK editions are cited, along with significant translations. Other editions, cited in the relevant notes, are sometimes used in the chapters. If no place of publication is given, the place is London. A more complete bibliography is available at the Victorian Fiction Research Guide website: http://www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/victorian-fiction-research-guides/ Granville de Vigne: A Tale of the Day New Monthly Magazine edited by William Harrison Ainsworth, January 1861– June 1863 as Held in Bondage, or Granville de Vigne: A Tale of the Day, 3 vols (Tinsley) 1863 as Granville de Vigne, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1864 as Held in Bondage, or Granville de Vigne, 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1873 Strathmore, or Wrought by his Own Hand: A Life Romance New Monthly Magazine edited by William Harrison Ainsworth, July 1863– February 1865 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1865 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1866 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1871 Idalia. A Romance New Monthly Magazine edited by William Harrison Ainsworth, March 1865– February 1867 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1867 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1867 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1867 Chandos: A Novel 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1866 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 18661 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1871 Wolff 1984, p. 231 thinks 1869 is 1st edition but adds a question mark.

1

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Cecil Castlemaine’s Gage and Other Novelettes. Collected and revised by the author 1 vol. (Chapman & Hall) 1867 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1867 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1872 Randolph Gordon and Other Stories 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1867 Little Grand and the Marchioness; or, Our Maltese Peerage and Other Stories 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1867 Under Two Flags: A Story of the Household and the Desert British Army and Navy Review August 1865–June 1866 (incomplete) 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1867 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1867 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1871 Beatrice Boville and Other Stories 1 vol. (New York Carleton) 1867 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1868 Tricotrin: The Story of a Waif and Stray 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1869 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1869 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1870 Puck: His Vicissitudes, Adventures, Observations, Conclusions, Friendships, and Philosophies 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1870 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1871 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1870 Folle-Farine 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1871 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1871 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1872 A Dog of Flanders and Other Stories 1 vol. (Chapman & Hall) 1872 (with illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti) as A Leaf in the Storm, and Other Stories, 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1872 as A Leaf in the Storm; A Dog of Flanders; and other stories, 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1872

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Madame la Marquise and other novelettes 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1872 Pascarèl: Only a Story 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1873 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1873 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1873 Italian trans. as Pascarello, Nuova Antologia April–September 1873 Two Little Wooden Shoes: A Sketch 1 vol. (Chapman & Hall) 1874 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1874 as Bébée; or Two Little Wooden Shoes, 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1874 Signa: A Story 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1875 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1875 3 vols (Leipzig : B. Tauchnitz) 1875 In a Winter City: A Sketch 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1876 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1876 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1876 Ariadnê: The Story of a Dream 3 vols (Chapman & Hall) 1877 3 vols (Chatto & Windus) 1877 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1877 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1877 Friendship: A Story 3 vols (Chatto & Windus) 1878 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1878 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) Moths 3 vols (Chatto & Windus) 1880 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1880 3 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1880 Pipistrello and Other Stories 1 vol. (Chatto & Windus) 1880 1 vol. (New York: Munro) 1880 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1880

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A Village Commune 2 vols (Chatto & Windus) 1881 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1881 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1881 1 vol. Un Comune rurale in Italia. Racconto di Ouida, unauthorised trans. by Sofia Fortini-Santarelli (Firenze: G. Barbera, 1881) Bimbi: Stories for Children 1 vol. (Chatto & Windus) 1882 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1882 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1882 In Maremma: A Story 3 vols (Chatto & Windus) 1882 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1882 3 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1882 Wanda 3 vols (Chatto & Windus) 1883 3 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1883 as Wanda, Countess von Szalras, 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1883 Frescoes, etc. Dramatic Sketches. 1 vol. (Chatto & Windus) 1883 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1883 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1883 Wisdom, Wit and Pathos of Ouida, F. Sydney Morris (ed.) 1 vol. (Chatto & Windus) 1883 [1884] 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1884 3 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1884 Princess Napraxine 3 vols (Chatto & Windus) 1884 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1884 3 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1884 Othmar 3 vols (Chatto & Windus) 1885 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1885 3 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1885

Ouida: Novels and Other Volume Form Publications

A Rainy June 1 vol. (John and Robert Maxwell) 1885 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1885 1 vol. (New York: Frank F. Lovell) 1885 1 vol. (New York: Munro) 1885 Don Gesualdo 1 vol. (Routledge) 1886 (Tillotson’s Shilling Fiction) 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1886 1 vol. (New York: Norman L. Munro) 1886 A House Party 1 vol. (New York: Frank F. Lovell) 1886 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1886 1 vol. (Hurst & Blackett) 1887 Guilderoy Weekly Times 15 September 1888–8 March 1889 3 vols (Chatto & Windus) 1889 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1889 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1889 Ruffino and Other Stories 1 vol. (Chatto & Windus) 1890 1 vol. (New York: United States Book Company) 1890 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1890 Syrlin 3 vols (Chatto & Windus) 1890 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1890 3 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1890 The Tower of Taddeo 3 vols (Heinemann) 1892 1 vol. (New York: Hovenden) 1892 1 vol. (Leipzig: Heinemann and Balestier) 1892 Two Offenders and Other Tales 1 vol. (Chatto & Windus) 1894 1 vol. (Philadelphia: Lippincott) 1894 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1894

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The Silver Christ and a Lemon Tree 1 vol. (Unwin) 1894 1 vol. (New York & London: Macmillan) 1894 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1895 Views and Opinions 1 vol. (Methuen) 1895 Le Selve and Other Tales 1 vol. (Unwin) 1896 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1897 1 vol. (Boston, L.C. Page and Co. Inc.) 1897 The Massarenes 1 vol. (Sampson Low) 1897 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1897 1 vol. (New York: Fenno) 1897 Dogs, with plates, illustrating six types of Dog 1 vol. (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co) 1897 An Altruist, and Four Essays 1 vol. (Unwin) 1897 1 vol. (London & New York: Neely) 1897 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1897 La Strega and Other Stories 1 vol. (Sampson Low) 1899 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1899 1 vol. (Philadelphia & New York: Drexel Biddle) 1899 The Waters of Edera 1 vol. (New York: Fenno) 1899 1 vol. (London: Unwin) 1900 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1900 Critical Studies 1 vol. (Unwin) 1900 1 vol. (New York: Cassell) 1900 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1905 Street Dust and Other Stories 1 vol. (Philadelphia & New York: Drexel Biddle) 1899 1 vol. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1901 1 vol. (White & Bell) 1901

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Two New Dog Stories and Another 1 vol. (London & Philadelphia: Drexel Biddle, 1900) Helianthus: A Novel 1 vol. (London & New York: Macmillan) 1908 (Published unfinished) 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz) 1909 as A Prince of Europe, 1 vol. (New York: Grosset & Dunlap) 1908 A Tale of a Toad. Printed from the Original Manuscript in the possession of Lord Carlow 1 vol. (Corvinus Press) 1939

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Appendix 2

Ouida: Journalism (A Select Bibliography) Only those articles, letters to the editor and short stories that originally appeared in periodicals or newspapers that are referred to in this volume are listed below. For a more complete and chronological listing, see the Ouida bibliography at http://www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/victorian-fiction-research-guides/. ‘Anton Wiertz’, London Society (22 July 1872), 23–32 ‘Apropos of a Dinner’, Woman’s World (March 1888), 193–4 ‘Blind Guides to Italy’, Views and Opinions (London: Methuen, 1895), 160–87 ‘Cities of Italy’, North American Review 143 (November 1886), 462–77 ‘Conscription’, Fortnightly Review 52 (August 1892), 211–16 ‘The Crispi Dictatorship’, Contemporary Review 68 (August 1895), 241–55 ‘The Culture of Cowardice’, Humane Review (May 1890), 110–20 ‘Dashwood’s Drag; or, The Derby and What Came of It’, Bentley’s Miscellany (April–May 1859), 335–43, 487–96 ‘A Dog of Flanders: A Story of Noel’, Lippincott’s Magazine 9 (January 1872), 79–98 ‘Dumouriez – As a Soldier of the Revolution, Guilty or not Guilty?’, British Army and Navy Review I (December 1864), 521–35; (February 1865), 97–112; (March 1865), 238–58 ‘Female Suffrage’, North American Review 143 (September 1886), 290–306 ‘The Genius of D’Annunzio’, Fortnightly Review 61 (September 1896), 350–62 ‘Georges Darien’, Fortnightly Review 62 (September 1897), 341–57 ‘Has Christianity Failed?’, North American Review 152 (February 1891), 221–33 ‘An Impeachment of Modern Italy’, Review of Reviews 18 (September 1898), 245–54 ‘Imperialismo Inglese’, Nuova Antologia 170 (16 April 1900), 729–30 ‘The Italian Awakening’, Fortnightly Review 59 (April 1896), 541–6 ‘The Italy of To-day’, Views and Opinions (London: Methuen, 1895), 145–59 ‘Joseph Chamberlain’, Nuova Antologia 168 (1 December 1899), 576–85 ‘The Legislation of Fear’, Fortnightly Review 56 (October 1894), 552–61 ‘Lemaître on Dress’, Lady’s Realm 3 (November 1897), 65–9 Letter to the Editor, Contemporary Review 40 (November 1881), 841–2 ‘Literature and the English Book Trade’, North American Review 160 (February 1895), 157–65 ‘L’Uomo Fatale’, Views and Opinions (London: Methuen, 1895), 187–203 (orig. Fortnightly Review 61 o.s. 55 n.s. (March 1894), 355–64

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‘The Marquis di Rudini and Italian Politics’, Fortnightly Review 66 o.s. 60 n.s. (September 1896), 350–62 ‘The Misgovernment of Italy’, Fortnightly Review 69 o.s. 63 n.s. (June 1898), 957–76 ‘New Literary Factors’, The Times (22 May 1891), 3 ‘A New View of Shelley’, North American Review 150 (February 1890), 246–62 ‘The New Woman’, North American Review 158 (May 1894), 610–19 ‘The Obliteration of Florence’, National Review (16 November 1890), 303–9 ‘Richard Burton’, Fortnightly Review 79 (June 1906), 1039–45 ‘Romance and Realism’, letter to The Times (12 October 1882), 3–4 ‘The Scientific Torture of Lunatics: A Protest’, Humanity 2 (November 1897), 82–4 ‘Le Sécret Du Précepteur’, Fortnightly Review 59 o.s. 53 n.s. (June 1893), 829–35 ‘The Sins of Society’, Fortnightly Review 58 o.s. 53 n.s. (December 1892), 780–97 ‘Some Fallacies of Science’, North American Review 142 (February 1886), 139–52 ‘Stray Thoughts on Some Military Ribbons’, British Army and Navy Review, 2 (April 1865), 326–38 ‘Sulla decadenza delle nazioni latine’, Nuova Antologia 167 (16 September 1899), 193–201 ‘Sulla Felix. A Word on the Victor of the Esquiline Hill’, British Army and Navy Review, 2 (June 1865), 508–22 ‘The System of Mezzadria’, Gentleman’s Magazine 253 (July 1882), 105–11 ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’, North American Review 141 (September 1885), 213–25 ‘The Twentieth Italian Parliament’, Fortnightly Review 61 (May 1897), 679–86 ‘The Ugliness of Modern Life’, in Ouida, Critical Studies (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), 210–38 (orig. Nineteenth Century 39) (January 1896), 28–43 ‘Umiltà: a Tuscan Sketch’, Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 25 (January 1880), 38–58 reprinted in Pipistrello and Other Stories ‘Umiltà’ in Pipistrello and Other Stories (1880) (reprinted Boston, MA: Adamant Media Corporation, 2006) ‘Vilfredo Pareto’, Fortnightly Review 71 o.s. 65 n.s. (March 1898), 475–85 ‘Vulgarity’, North American Review 144 (February 1887), 148–60 ‘War’, Woman’s World 2 (1889), 171–3 ‘Wilfred Scawen Blunt’, Critical Studies (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), 143–64 ‘The Woman Problem I. Shall Women Vote?: A Study of Feminine Unrest – Its Causes and its Remedies’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 83 (January–June 1909), 586–92 ‘The Woman Problem II. Love Versus Avarice: A Frank Analysis of the Causes Which Make for Social Evil’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 83 (January–June, 1909), 712–17 ‘A Word on the Practice of Duelling. Apropos de Brantôme’, British Army and Navy Review 2 (May 1865), 421–36

Appendix 3

British Theatrical Adaptations of Ouida’s Novels BOLTON: H. Philip Bolton, Women Writers Dramatised: A Calendar of Performances from Narrative Works Published in English to 1900 (London & New York: Mansell, 2000) LC: Lord Chamberlain’s Collection, British Library MULLIN: Donald Mullin, Victorian Plays: A Record of Significant Productions on the London Stage, 1837–1901 (New York & London: Greenwood Press, 1987) NICOLL: Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1900, 5 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962) WEARING: J.P. Wearing, The London Stage 1890–1899: A Calendar of Plays and Players, 2 vols (London: Scarecrow, 1976); The London Stage 1900–1909, 2 vols (London: Scarecrow, 1981) 1867 Idalia Adapted by George Roberts St James’s Theatre, London Opens Easter Monday, 22 April Stoneleigh [i.e. Erceldoune]..... Charles Wyndham Count Falcon............................ Henry Irving Victor Vane............................... F. Charles Volpone Vitello........................ J.D. Stoyle Baron Lintz.............................. Gaston Murray Idalia........................................ Louisa Herbert This was a superior production and members of the cast all received excellent reviews. Frederick Fenton’s costly and artistic Italian scenery greatly impressed the Pall Mall Gazette (18 April 1867, p. 4), the Daily News (23 April 1867, p. 2), and the Musical Examiner (27 April 1867, p. 263). Era also commended the ‘various efforts [made] in the direction of “realism”’, which included an imitation of a distant cannonade, and the use of real water in the gondola scene (28 April 1867, p. 10). Interestingly, the ‘strikingly truthful’ view of the Gorge of Gondo ‘drew from a portion of the audience a buzz of recognition’ (Morning Post, 23 April 1867, p. 3). Unfortunately, on the opening night the waterfall in this scene overflowed the

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stage and Charles Wyndham slipped and fell; he later recounted ‘how massive rocks were knocked over by [the] falling bodies’ of other members of the cast; Herbert, Wyndham and Irving failed to contain their laughter in the closing scene (‘Anecdotes and Reminiscences of Famous Actors’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 27 December 1891, pp. 5–6). Idalia finally closed on Friday 31 May; Louisa Herbert performed in Roberts’ adaptation of Lady Audley’s Secret for her Benefit on Saturday 1 June. Roberts subsequently registered his adaptation of Idalia in America. BOLTON, 232 LC, Add. MSS 53058 L. MULLIN, 162 NICOLL, V, 544 1869 Firefly Adaptation by Edith Sandford under the original title, Under Two Flags; or, A Race for Life Through Flood and Flame Surrey Theatre, London Opens 17 May 1869 Captain Leonard Grantley..... Mr Shepherd Lord Castleford..................... Edmund Phelps Colonel Durand..................... E.F. Edgar Rock...................................... Mat Robson Mordecai/Alderim................. Mr Vollaire Cigarette................................ Edith Sandford Duchess Di Rhonna............... Georgina Pauncefort This was an equestrian version of Under Two Flags which was evidently influenced by the success of the New York adaptation of Firefly (1868), starring Lotta Crabtree. Sandford was forced to amend the original title following a dispute with Ouida who issued a public protest against the adaptation (The Times, 12 May 1869, p. 12). For Ouida’s correspondence with Sandford, see New York Public Library, Berg Collection, Ouida Correspondence. Firefly was the kind of extravaganza familiar to audiences at the Surrey or the more famous Astley’s. The production was ‘upon a scale of magnificence’, requiring extensive stage machinery in the final scene in which ‘three tons of material are employed’ (Reynolds’s Newspaper, 16 May 1869, p. 5; Hull Packet, 3 December 1869, p. 5). Sandford performed dangerous feats in the course of the drama, which included riding (‘without saddle or bridle’) across a burning stage (Era, 12 June 1870, p. 1). A very funny parody of Sandford’s adaptation appeared in Fun, 5 June 1869, p. 135. After a tremendously successful run at the Surrey, Sandford took the production to a succession of

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regional amphitheatres, finally ending her tour in June 1871. She married the actor Whit Rogerson and died on 6 July 1889. LC, Add. MSS 53077 H. MULLIN, 109 NICOLL, V, 555 1870 Under Two Flags Unattributed and unlicensed adaptation [Theatre unknown], Norwich Opens 24 October Bertie Cecil........... Henry Powell Cigarette................ Bessie Reid Bolton and Nicholl claim that this adaptation was written by W.H. Abel. However, the play was not registered (according to Nicholl, several of Abel’s were not), and the fact that this production was equestrian, featuring ‘Harry Powell’s Selected Dramatic Company and the Thoroughbred Mare, Black Bess, and Arabic Steed Saladin’, suggests that it may have been based upon Edith Sandford’s Firefly (see above). According to Powell’s advertisements, his production was authorized by Ouida. After finishing in Norwich on 19 November, Powell toured the provinces up to 1 July 1871 (including the Theatres Royal at Leicester, South Shields and Dundee). Like Sandford, Henry Powell devised shorter equestrian dramas to complement Under Two Flags, such as The Lightning’s Flash, introducing both Horses in great Sensation Scene, the Burning Chaparral’ (Era, 9 April 1871, p. 1). In 1874, Henry Powell took Under Two Flags to Sadler’s Wells, London, where he was briefly the Manager and Lessee; Bessie Reid revived her role as Cigarette (5 January–7 February 1874). Powell died in 1878. BOLTON, 237 NICOLL, V, 234 1873 Passion; A Drama in Four Acts Adaption of Strathmore (1865) by Walter Stephens Licensed 5 February 1873 Vaudeville Theatre, Strand Two matinée performances on 8 and 15 February 1873

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Ethel Daubigny.............. Louise Ritter Nathalie Fortesque......... Edith Lloyd According to Lloyds’s Weekly Newspaper the production was ‘of a very straggling character’ (16 February 1873, p. 5), and the press showed little interest in it. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office required that a number of amendments be made to the representation of the siren, Ethel (Marion Vavasour in the original novel): references to ‘adultery’ are cut (Act I, Scene 1), and suggestions that she will descend into prostitution are softened (Act II, Scene 3, Act IV, Scene 1); rather than being an unmarried adventuress, Ethel becomes a married woman, separated from her husband. LC, Add. MSS 53117 P. MULLIN, 289 NICOLL, V, 581 1876 Ethel’s Revenge; A Drama Walter Stephen’s attempt to revise Passion (see above); advertised as ‘An Entirely New and Original Play’ Licensed 31 August 1876 Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square Opens 9 September 1876 Ernest, Lord Mountsorrell..........Charles Kelly Major Bruce Fortesque..............S. Leathes Ethel Daubigny..........................Helen Barry Nathalie Fortesque.....................Florence Roberts Dowager Lady Mountsorrell......Rebecca Isaacs [Florence Roberts’s mother] Ouida tried to enlist the help of her friend, the widow of Shirley Brooks, to enquire whether she could do anything to stop this ‘travesty of Strathmore’, as she described it (Wolff Uncat., 17 September 1876, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin). She then decided to issue a public protest against ‘the grossest and most injurious form of plagiarism’, Era, 24 September 1876, p. 4. Era sympathised with Ouida, but objected to her subsequent remarks about the (inferior) state of the English theatre, and her letter led to a lengthy debate in the paper in succeeding weeks (1 October 1876, p. 4). This second adaptation of Strathmore was far more respectable and the Lord Chamberlain did not intervene with any cuts or amendments. According to Lloyds’s Weekly Newspaper, ‘The plot resembled a story by Ouida, but none of the fascination of the novelist was transferred to the stage’ (10 September 1876, p. 1). The Daily News recognized

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‘the hand of the novice in dramatic art’ and found the motivation of the characters incomprehensible: ‘The play almost from the commencement failed to give an impression of reality [partly due] to the rhetorical style of the dialogue, which more than once provoked laughter’ (11 September 1876, p. 6). Ethel’s Revenge was taken off after little more than a fortnight, ‘first, on account of the letter and threat of “Ouida”, and secondly – and chiefly – because the piece did not pay’ (Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 2 October 1876, p. 4). Era referred back to this production in 1879, explaining that Ouida was particularly incensed because she found herself ‘blamed for the eccentricities of the adapter’ (21 September 1879, p. 3). LC, Add. MSS 53170 N. MULLIN, 98 NICOLL, V, 581 1880 Delilah; or, Married for Hate Adaptation of Held in Bondage (1863) by James Willing Royal Park Theatre, Camden Town Opens 7 October 1880 Sir Arthur Tempest................. William Redmund Major Bond............................ John Beauchamp Charles Hazleton.................... Ernest Wilmore Miss Trevelyan....................... Amy Steinberg Ada Trevor............................. Stella Brereton Lady Tempest......................... Fanny Addison Dowager Lady Greytown....... Bella Cuthbert Lady Wyndham...................... Ada Murray Willing’s adaptation received pleasing reviews, but two papers baulked at the sexual content: ‘Its story has that special flavour of nastiness which is ineradicable from the works of “Ouida” … On stage, with the added vivacity of representation, the morbid creations of prose fiction are really dangerous [and] the scarcely veiled lubricity of [the femme fatale] Ada Trevor, produce a singularly uncomfortable effect’ (Pall Mall Gazette, 9 October 1880, p. 11); ‘Ouida’s words do not often err in excess of delicacy’, and Major Bond’s allusions to the wife from whom he is separated were ‘too powerful to be pleasant’ (Standard, 9 October 1880, p. 3). Ouida protested against Willing’s ‘dramatic piracy’ in a letter to the Editor of The Times, to which Willing replied that his drama ‘is not by any means an adaptation of the novel “Held in Bondage”, but simply founded on Ouida’s story’ (correspondence reprinted in Era, 21 November 1880, p. 8). Ouida failed to enlist the support of her publishers, Chatto & Windus, to whom she wrote about Willing’s adaptation on 14

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November [1880] and in an undated letter a week later (New York Public Library, Berg Collection). Delilah transferred to the Globe Theatre, London, 30 October, where it enjoyed an extended run; Willing celebrated its 100th performance on 17 March 1881. On 16 October 1882, the play opened at the Royal Princess’s Theatre, Glasgow, with Amy Steinberg reprising her role as Delilah/Miss Trevelyan. The play was then revived in London, ten years later, the title now amended to Delilah; or, Married in Hate, and opened at Sadler’s Wells on 26 September 1892. The piece was chosen by Edith Russell, manager at the theatre, who took the part of Delilah. Era reflected that, bar Henry Hamilton’s adaptation of Moths, ‘Perhaps there is no lady novelist who has been more “adapted” than Ouida [and who has] suffered more in the process’ (1 October 1892, p. 9). LC, Add. MSS 53276 H. MULLIN, 80 NICOLL, V, 626 1882 Moths Adaptation by Henry Hamilton, originally licensed under the title Star and Flame Licensed 31 January 1882 Globe Theatre, Strand Opens 25 March 1882; transfers to the Olympic, 27 April 1882 Prince Zouroff............................C. Cartwright Correze.......................................Kyrle Bellew Lord Jura....................................J.A. Rosier Duke of Mull and Cantyre.........Henry Hamilton Ivan............................................Mr Cautley Vere............................................Marie Litton Lady Dolly Vanderdecken..........Carlotta Addison Duchesse de Sonnaz...................Maud Brennan Fuschia Leach............................Louise Willes Princess Nadine Nelaguine........Miss Claremont Ouida first noted advertisements for Hamilton’s adaptation in The Times in late February, and wrote to Chatto & Windus on two occasions asking whether she had legal grounds to stop the production (New York Public Library, Berg Collection, 26 February 1882 and n.d. [late February 1882]). Ouida’s public protest against Hamilton’s unauthorized adaptation, and Hamilton’s reply, is discussed in Chapter 4 above. In a review of a later production, the Athenaeum hoped that Ouida was ‘sensible of the honour done to her by such an association’ (1 April 1882, p. 421); insensible of the honour, Ouida maintained her public opposition to

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Hamilton’s adaptation. As late as 1896, when the play was chosen for the occasion of the annual Actors’ Benevolent Fund performance at the St James’s Theatre, Ouida wrote to the editor of the Morning Post: Allow me … to revive the unavailing protest which I made at the appearance of this travesty of my novel, and this iniquitous use of my name … I shall be obliged if you will allow me … to remind the public that its production, and its impudent advertisement of my name, are only endured by me because the law gives me no help against them’ (15 May 1896, p. 2).

The Lord Chamberlain directed that minor amendments were made to Hamilton’s adaptation, particularly those conversations between Vere and her sister-in-law with reference to Zouroff’s infidelities (Acts II and III). In Hamilton’s denouement, Lord Jura shoots and kills Zouroff. Despite mixed reviews (those in Era and Reynolds’s Newspaper were very critical), Hamilton’s remained the most popular of all the subsequent adaptations of Moths. May Fortescue first played the role of Vere in 1886, and, after a brief American tour with Hamilton’s Moths, returned to England in 1887. In an interview with the Western Mail (5 February 1895, p. 7), Fortescue claimed to have played Vere more than 400 times; she was still touring provincial theatres with Moths up to 1900, although she was now (at the age of 38) playing the comic part of the American heiress, Fuschia Leach. BOLTON, 233 LC, Add. MSS 53266 O. MULLIN, 253 NICOLL, V, 80; V, 401 Moths-Quitoes; A Burlesque in One Act A Burlesque of Moths by D.W. Edgar Licensed 18 April 1882 Theatre Royal, Middlesbrough Opens 21 April 1882 This was a burlesque of Henry Hamilton’s adaptation of Moths, which satirized the degree to which Hamilton had been forced to censor the sexual content of Ouida’s novel: ‘Revised to suit the taste of the most sensitive weader [sic]’, MothsQuitoes; a Burlesque in One Act (Cardiff: Daniel Own, Howell & Co, 1882). The fact that Hamilton had also altered the denouement was noted: having been killed in a sword fight with Zouroff, in the fifth and final scene, Correze walks back on stage and vows to marry Vere. ‘Pick-me-up’ (Fuscia Leach) observes, ‘It seems to me this ending ain’t quite right’, to which Dolly replies, ‘Then p’rhaps we’ll alter it some other night’ (p. 29). Edgar was a well-known journalist and the London representative of the Western Mail. Jenny Willmore bought the provincial rights for the season. The rights were subsequently bought by George Goddard

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Whyatt (not the rights to Moths Traps, as was reported in the Belfast News-Letter, 7 August 1882, p. 1), and Whyatt took Edgar’s burlesque to the Theatre Royal, Belfast, where it opened on Monday 14 August 1882. BOLTON, 233 LC, Add. MSS 53271 A. NICOLL, V, 80; V, 353 Moths Adapted by John Chute License granted 28 July 1882 Royal, Greenwich Bolton notes that the play opened at Croydon on 29 August 1882. Chute’s adaptation was the most faithful to the novel, and as a consequence was heavily censored by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office: the numerous references to the adulterous relations between Lord Jura and Lady Dolly, and Prince Zouroff and Jeanne de Sonnaz, are muted; interestingly, Vere is not permitted to call her husband an adulterer (Act III, Scene 1) whereas Correze is (Act IV, Scene 1). BOLTON, 233–4 LC, Add. MSS 53276 H. NICOLL, V, 80; V, 310 Chandos; Or, The Jester who turned Traitor Adapted by Hartbury Brooklyn Adelphi Theatre, London Single matinée performance 30 September 1882 Chandos..............Mr Carleton Trevenna..............R.S. Boleyn Lady Valeria........Elsie Carew Chandos was universally savaged by the critics; the single redeeming feature was R.S. Boleyn’s attractive impersonation of the villain, Trevenna. Brooklyn’s was intended as a comic adaptation of Ouida’s distinctly uncomic novel; the Standard called it a ‘curious experiment’ (2 October 1882, p. 2). The Glasgow Herald recognised the work of an amateur dramatist; too much dialogue was simply lifted from the novel, and the play was overburdened with too many unconnected scenes. The paper expressed much sympathy for Ouida, who would ‘have just cause to complain of the travestie [sic] of her novel’; it was high time that the government intervened in order to ‘pass a measure which will render illegal those perversions of a popular author’s brain work’ (2 October 1882, p. 8). Brooklyn announced

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his intention to rewrite the play ‘as an aesthetic comedy drama in four tableaux’ (Daily News, 9 October 1882, p. 3). LC, Add. MSS 53280 C. MULLIN, 51 NICOLL, V, 277 Moths Adapted by Marion Grace Licensed 5 January 1882 Royal Opera House Opens October 1882 Grace’s adaptation was forced to undergo minor amendments: the Lord Chamberlain cut Correze’s reference to Zouroff’s being ‘faithless’ (Act III, Scene 1); Zouroff’s exclamation ‘By God!’ was changed to ‘By heaven!’ (Act III, Scene 1); and Jeanne de Sonnaz’s attempt to persuade Vere to commit adultery, ‘One moment and you are safe in your lover’s arms,’ was amended to ‘your lover’s care’ (Act IV, Scene 1). In Grace’s denouement, Jeanne de Sonnaz shoots and kills Zouroff. BOLTON, 233 LC, Add. MSS 53280 A. Wrath; Or, a Message from the Dead Adaptation of Strathmore (1865) by C.H. Stephenson Theatre Royal, Huddersfield Opens 6 October 1882 Lord Perceval................. Edmund Sass Fred Rushbrooke............ Hugh Marston Mr Gibson...................... C. Wilford Comte de Vaux............... F. Percival Count Oscar................... K. Robinson The Hon. W. Morley...... Fred Shepherd Ferryman........................ Mr Judson Servant........................... Mr Jamieson Lady Rathlaugh.............. Amy Steinberg Lilian Rushbrooke.......... Amy Ferris Lady Perceval................. Mary Griffiths Zilah............................... Miss Maude Mdlle Beatrice................ J. Carylon Mddle Graw................... Miss Edminston

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Era gave the play a good review, and commended the skill of the adaptor in handling the original text, which included one notable deviation for ‘greater dramatic effect’: the siren Lady Rathlaugh (Marion Vavasour in the novel) dies at the end, ‘leaving unfinished the sentence, “He was your father’s―”’ (14 October 1882, p. 14). The John Douglas Company who had produced the play at Huddersfield subsequently toured Glasgow and Dundee, and played at the National Standard Theatre, London, for one performance only, on Monday 18 December 1882, for the Benefit of Messrs John and R. Douglas. MULLIN, 421 NICOLL, V, 583 1883 Moths Adapted by Dorothy Langdale Licensed 7 February 1883 Langdale’s was a sanitised version of Moths and contained nothing to offend the Lord Chamberlain’s Office; Jeanne de Sonnaz, Zouroff’s mistress, is cut altogether, and in Langdale’s denouement, Lord Jura kills Zouroff, allowing Correze to marry the heroine unscathed. BOLTON, 234 LC, Add. MSS 53288 I. Moths à la Mode a Burlesque Trifle in One Act A Burlesque of Moths (1880) by F.H. Herbert Licensed 23 February 1883, for Her Majesty’s, Aberdeen Princess Theatre, Edinburgh Opens 5 March 1883 Herbert’s burlesque, like that of D.W. Edgar (see above), satirised the lengths to which the several theatrical adaptors of Moths toned down the sensational aspects of Ouida’s novel in order to meet the Lord Chamberlain’s approval, and too the fact that each had conceived of denouements which departed from the original text. In Herbert’s version, the young heroine is ‘the fastest of the fast’ (p. 5): ‘She’s pretty, she’s young, but there she is so naughty, / Tho’ just sixteen, behaves as if she’s forty’ (p. 4); Dolly prevents Correze from killing Zouroff, ‘’Cause we want him for tomorrow night’ (p. 16). BOLTON, 234 LC, Add. MSS 53289 I. NICOLL, V, 80; V, 418

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Moths Adapted by M.E. Seaton Rotunda Theatre, Liverpool Opens 19 March 1883 Unlicensed adaptation, and not the first version of Moths to play at Liverpool. Players are listed in the Liverpool Mercury, 21 March 1883, p. 6. BOLTON, 234 NICOLL, V, 80; V, 559 Moths Adapted by W.F. Lyon Licensed 10 July 1883 Peterborough Lyons’s adaptation and that of Langdale (see above) were the only licensed dramatizations of Moths to evade censorship. In Lyons’s denouement, the serf Ivan shoots and kills Zouroff. Over a decade later, Lyon revived his adaptation of Moths (still taking the role of Correze) at the Aquarium, Scarborough, opening on Monday 19 February 1894 (Yorkshire Herald, 14 February 1894, p. 3). BOLTON, 234 LC, Add. MSS 53289 B. NICOLL, V, 80; V, 465 Puck Adapted by Marion Grace Licensed for the Royal Opera House, Torquay, 24 October 1882 Opens at Bournemouth Theatre Two performances only, on 13 and 15 August 1883 Lord Beltram......................Alfred J. Byde Avice Dare/Laura Pearl......Florence Wade Gladys................................Lily Fane Nellie..................................Marie Villiers The Era commended the adaptor for having censored the original novel in order to present ‘a palatable and inoffensive dish for the gratification of the public taste’ (18 August 1883, p. 5). The following week Florence Wade took the production to the St Julian’s Hall, Saint Peter Port, on Guernsey. Wade’s London Company revived the play under the amended title, Puck; or, The Lass o’ Moorside, at the

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Princess’s Theatre, Edinburgh, on 2 June 1884, for six nights only. Charles E. Dering, who would adapt Idalia in 1885 (see below) played Jack Dangerfield. Wade next took the play to the Athenaeum Theatre, Shepherd’s Bush, on 31 July 1884, for the occasion of Kenneth Black’s Benefit. According to Era, Wade assembled a ‘scratch company’ (25 April 1885, p. 14). The new cast included Wade as Avice Dare, Kenneth Black (Ben Dare), R.D. Hill (Lord Beltram), Cecil Thornbury (Derry Denzil), W.S. Buist (Carlos Merle), Albert Chevalier (Dick O’Wynnate), Miss L. Russell (Gladys Gerant), Annie Kinnaird (Nellie); Wade’s terrier played the part of Puck. On this occasion, Era found fault with the immoral content retained from the original novel: ‘it cannot be denied that the tone of the story … is unpleasant, and the phases of life which are best treated with a certain amount of reserve, are unnecessarily accentuated’ (2 August 1884, p. 8). LC, Add. MSS 53281 H. Under Two Flags; A Military Drama Adapted by James S. Thacker License given for the Bijou Theatre, Woolwich, 31 October 1883 Opens at Theatre Royal, West Bromwich Opens 9 December 1883 Bertie Cecil..... Arthur Vaughan Cigarette.......... Maggie Lewis Thacker capitalised on the spectacle afforded by the novel’s vivid realisation of camp life: advertisements promised ‘Twelve Full Uniforms of French Chasseurs, Tents, etc.’, with authentic ‘Costumes by Hart & Son, Military Outfitters’ (Era 3 November 1883, p. 16) . His provincial tour took in Chorley, York, Blackburn, Wakefield, Leicester, Glasgow, Paisley and Ashton, before terminating on 9 June 1884. The Glasgow Evening Times regarded the adaptation as an artistic failure, considering that the novel ‘has taken its rank as the foremost in point of clever construction and interest among the authoress’s many fictions’: in Thacker’s hands, ‘the more prominent incidents of the novel … are dramatic enough in all conscience, but their consistency and naturalness are glaringly defective’, and the cast ‘did little to mitigate the crudeness of his work’ (25 March 1882, p. 2). Whilst Thacker was on tour, Lotta Crabtree made a much publicized return to London, in December 1883, where she revived the role of Firefly (Cigarette) at the Opera Comique in the Aldwych. LC, Add. MSS 53304 B. BOLTON, 238 NICOLL (V, 762) lists the play as unattributed

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1884 Moths Unlicensed adaptation by Mervyn Dallas Strand Theatre, London Opens 26 June 1884 Zouroff........................... Mervyn Dallas Correze........................... E.J. Wilde Lord Jura........................ Clarence Hague Duke of Mull.................. D. Berenger Ivan................................ Uleck Winter Lady Dolly..................... Kate Hope Vere................................ Frances Deleval Duchesse de Sonnaz....... Mrs C. Cecil Fuschia Leach................ Mrs Digby Willoughby Era commended Dallas’s adaptation, saying that ‘he could not have done better than to introduce the smart and killing dialogue of this popular writer’, but its reviewer had harsh words for the actresses playing Lady Dolly and Jeanne de Sonnaz for falling short of Ouida’s wicked heroines: ‘the caustic satire levelled by Ouida against the heartless fashionable mothers, who sell their daughters, body and soul, for the sake of wealth, title, and position, loses all its force. [Miss Hope] should thoroughly get into her mind what is meant by the sentences put into Lady Dolly’s mouth’; and ‘there was little indication of the wily, sensual, treacherous [Duchesse de Sonnaz] Ouida has drawn’ (27 June 1884, p. 5). BOLTON, 235 MULLIN, 253 NICOLL, V, 80; V, 332 Folle Farine Adapted by Walter Avondale Licensed in 1882 as Satan’s Daughter Sadler’s Wells Opens 18 October 1884 The Artist........ E.N. Hallows Flamma........... H. Bertram Folle Farine..... Miss Marie Forde Margot............. Nellie Lionel Avondale received good reviews in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (19 October 1884, p. 1) and Era (25 October 1884, p. 14). Era continued to advertize this production

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up to 15 November 1884. Interestingly, two members of the cast, Marie Forde and E.N. Hallows, had already starred in productions of Moths. The run at the Olympic appears to have terminated mid-November. A provincial production, at the Theatre Royal, Colchester, followed in April 1885, put on by Herr Van Den Bosshe’s Co. The cast included Grace O’Malley as Folle Farine, Frederic Dobell as Flamma, George H. Gray as Phratos, and Preston Marchant as Philip Erston. The Essex Standard commented on the sensational nature of Avondale’s adaptation: ‘numerous blood-curdling incidents … the committal of a couple of murders, two characters picture the agony of madness, one dies in the sight of the audience, while there are sundry mortal combats, firing of guns, and brandishing of bowie-knives and hatchets’ (18 April 1885, p. 5). According to Nicholl there had been two prior provincial productions: at the Prince of Wales, Wolverhampton, 4 November 1882, and at Bishop Auckland, 10 March 1884. LC, Add. MSS MULLIN, 113 NICOLL, V, 246 Under Two Flags; An entirely new and original Military Drama Adapted (by permission) from Ouida’s celebrated novel of the same name Adapted by George Daventry Licensed 13 September 1882 for the Theatre Royal, Dundee Pavilion Theatre, Stepney Opens November 1884 Bertie Cecil.................Henry Hampton Lord Rockingham.......G.F. Leicester Berkeley......................Walter Treville Rake............................George Daventry Chateauroy..................J.A. Arnold Chanrellon...................Cecil Ward Cigarette......................Claire Howard Lady Venetia...............Harriet Clifton Lady Guinevere...........Katie Cohen Djelma.........................Alice Beckett Daventry signed the manuscript on 21 April 1882, but the play was not submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office until 13 September. Under Two Flags was licensed for the Royal Theatre, Dundee, but appears not to have been produced until November the following year at the Pavilion, which, as the Era observed, ‘caters chiefly for humble playgoers’, 25 October 1884, p.14. Wholly inconsistent with Ouida’s much publicized opposition to dramatizations of her work, she apparently authorized Daventry’s adaptation of Under Two Flags (see Era 15

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November 1884, p. 14). Despite the fact that Daventry was prepared to spend a good deal on ‘magnificent scenery and effects’ (Standard, 14 November 1884, p. 4), which included the liberal use of gunpowder (Era, 15 November 1884, p. 14), his adaptation had a relatively brief run between late October and mid-November. Daventry subsequently devised a sensational sketch, ‘solely to exhibit Miss Claire Howard’s proficiency with the duelling sword’ (Era, 19 March 1887, p. 15). Daventry and Howard performed this sketch, entitled, Beneath the Tricoleur, as a music hall variety act at the Parthenon, Greenwich (12 February to 5 March 1887). BOLTON, 237 LC, Add. MSS 53277 J. MULLIN, 391 NICOLL, V, 338 1885 Favette Adaptation by John Tresahar Strand Theatre, Aldwych Opens at the Vaudeville, 29 January 1885 (single matinee performance) Favette......Miss Florence West LC, Add. MSS 53330 W. MULLIN, 107 NICOLL, V, 603 Heartless Unattributed adaptation of Puck (1870) (revival of Marion Grace’s 1883 Puck) Olympic, London Opens 18 April 1885 Carlos Merle.......................Kyrle Bellew Lord Beltran.......................Percy Lyndal Avice Dare/Laura Pearl......Florence Wade Gladys Gerant....................Eva Southern The verdict of one reviewer was that ‘A wretchedly bad play has been manufactured out of [Ouida’s] disagreeable story’, Morning Post (20 April 1885, p. 2); the Standard agreed that the crude adaptation was not suited to the London stage or to an evening performance (20 April 1885, p. 2). The Graphic argued that Ouida’s novels were not suited to adaptation (25 April 1885, p. 407). At the disastrous

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first night, the audience ‘waited to howl its disapprobation until the final curtain fell’, and the production was ‘roundly hissed’ (Morning Post, 20 April 1885, p. 2). Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper doubted ‘if a more unsatisfactory attempt has ever been made to dramatize a popular novel’ (19 April 1885, p. 1). Heartless appears to have been withdrawn at the end of the week (see Marion Grace’s letter in Era, 25 April 1885, p. 15, referred to in Chapter 4, which explains how her adaptation was commissioned by Florence Wade who subsequently tampered with the script). Nonetheless, Florence Wade kept the play in her repertoire and revived Puck during her provincial tour in late 1889 (Academy, 12 October 1889, p. 244). The authorship of Heartless was disputed at the time: Era suggested that it had been written by the manager of the Olympic, Eugene C. Stafford, and that Stafford’s brother produced the same play as his own in 1887 (Era, 22 October 1887, p. 13), but Nicholl does not attribute this adaptation to either brother. MULLIN, 145 The Power of England Adaptation of Idalia (1867) by Charles E. Dering Licensed 9 June 1885 Imperial Theatre, Westminster Opens 17 June 1885 Sir Fulke Erceldone.............J.A. Rosier Count Conrad Phaulcon......Charles E. Dering Victor Vane..........................J.B. Ashley Idalia...................................Mrs Digby Willoughby A weak review in Era compared Dering’s new adaptation unfavourably with the original 1867 dramatization by George Roberts, complaining that Dering was ‘up to his eyes in jingoism … [T]he dialogue is so high-flown and the action in many places so supremely ridiculous that laughter is compelled just where serious interest is looked for’ (20 June 1886, p. 14). The Saturday Review condemned the production as ‘a melodrama of the most excruciating type, full of exciting incident and wild incongruities … Every species of extravagance is enacted … a chaotic farrago of incredible bombast. If Ouida’s novels may be thus dramatised, where are we to stop?’ (20 June 1885, p. 823). Despite the bad press, this production continued to be advertised up to 4 July 1885. LC, Add. MSS 53339 M. MULLIN, 303 NICOLL, V, 343

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1886 Under Two Flags Unlicensed adaptation by Henry James Byron Theatre Royal Opera House, Colchester Opens 18 January Bertie Cecil.......Edmund Russell Chateauroy........Norman V. Norman Baroni................Henry Carlyle Cigarette............Sarah Dudley Booked for one week only, with a ‘GRAND MILITARY NIGHT Under the Distinguished Patronage of the Garrison’ on Friday 22 January. According to an advert in the Essex Standard, the company had been playing Under Two Flags for ‘upwards of 300 nights in the Principal Towns of England and Scotland’ (16 January 1886, p. 1). This adaptation was not licensed; Byron was a prolific dramatist, but neither Nicholl or Bolton attribute this adaptation to Bryon. Under Two Flags was frequently revived in regional theatres throughout the 1890s, although it is very difficult to ascertain which adaptations – whether those of Daventry, Thacker or Byron – were the most popular. The Little Pilgrim Adaptation of Two Little Wooden Shoes (1874) by W.G. Wills Licensed for the Criterion Theatre, 2 June 1886 Opens with special matinée on 3 July 1886 Arthur Blair.......W.E. Gregory Jacques..............Fred Emery Bébée.................Annie Hughes Bertha Blair.......ffolliott Paget Wills’s adaptation was advertised as ‘A Free Version (by permission of the Authoress)’. The Era argued that it was a useless exercise to present Ouida’s idyllic creation in ‘the banal and conventional manner which is thought to be most acceptable by an average English audience’, and questioned whether poetical works like Ouida’s could be successfully adapted for the stage (10 July 1886, p. 15). The theatrical paper Dramatic Notes regarded the two-act adaptation as a ‘sorry failure’: ‘a crowd of cockney ballet girls sporting on the floor as unlike village maidens an anything could be … The idealisation of “Ouida” does not mix well with the affectation of Westbourne Grove’, (January 1886, pp. 74–5). A number of reviewers observed that the novel was unsuited to dramatization; only the Pall Mall Gazette pointed out that it was so on the grounds of

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immorality (5 July 1886, p. 3). A year earlier, the Nottinghamshire Guardian announced that Boucicault was working on a new five-act comedy of Ouida’s Two Little Wooden Shoes, ‘which, it is said, the dramatist is treating on the same lines as in his famous comedy “London Assurance”’ (16 January 1885, p. 3). The story was picked up by Era which noted that during an interview in Boston, Boucicault confirmed his intention, saying further that the role of the heroine would suit his daughter’ (17 January 1885, p. 11); no such play materialized. LC, Add. MSS 53362 C. MULLIN, 205 NICOLL, V, 627 A Child of Chance Adaptation of Tricotrin (1869) by H. Howell-Poole Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool Opens 6 August 1886 Tricotrin........................ W. Howell-Poole Lord Estmere................. W.F. Lyon Duke de Lira................. Brandon Ellis Viscount Chanrellon...... Arthur Raynor Paulus-Canaris.............. Henry Holden Jean Bruno.................... W. Lee Brunt Valentin......................... Fred. Irving Sarazin........................... A. Grahame Turgot............................ R. Robertson Viva............................... Alice Raynor Duchess de Lira............. Emily Scott Coriolis.......................... Pattie Verner Ninette........................... Elise Elbert Susanne......................... Ruby Waldegrave Gran’mere Virelois........ Marie Weiss According to the Liverpool Mercury, Howell-Poole’s adaptation of Tricotrin was ‘free’, and the dialogue lacked dignity, ‘except where Ouida’s book is made good use of’; the adaptor was, however, commended for his sensitive omissions, given Ouida’s ‘offensive’ female characters and the ‘obnoxious’ atmosphere in which they habitually breathe (7 August 1886, p. 5). Era praised Howell-Poole for keeping to the original text as faithfully as possible: ‘The literary style is … excellent, largely indicating the nature of the special characteristics of the authoress of the novel’ (14 August 1886, p. 12). A Child of Chance transferred to the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, Liverpool, Monday 16 August. Era reported that Kyrle Bellew

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(who had starred in productions of Moths and Heartless), had secured the New York rights (28 August 1886) LC, Add. MSS 53363 E. 1887 Princess Carlo’s Plot Unlicensed adaptation by Hilda Hilton of ‘Afternoon’ (a one-act play from Ouida’s 1883 collection, Frescoes) Novelty Theatre, London Single performance, 31 January 1887 Prince Carlo........................Eric Lewis The Marquis of Ipswich......Brandon Thomas Aldred Doraime..................Matthew Brodie Philip Dormer......................William Herwern Princess Carlo.....................Minnie Bell Clair.....................................Louise Moodie The Marchesa......................Dolores Drummond Lady Cowes........................Mrs E.H. Brooke Countess of St Asaph..........Constance Abbott According to Dramatic Notes, the play was produced for one night ‘for copyright purposes’ (January 1887, p. 13). The Era observed of Hilton’s production that it was ‘so flimsy and unsatisfactory a bit of work that it is hardly likely to be heard of again’ (5 February 1887, p. 14), and the Athenaeum commented that the story was simply ‘not strong enough for the three acts over which it is expanded’ (5 February 1887, p. 202). MULLIN, 305 NICOLL, V, 422 1890 A People’s Hero H. Howell-Poole’s unlicensed adaptation of Trictorin (originally dramatized as A Child of Chance in 1886; characters’ names also changed) Vaudeville, Strand Opens with matinee, 12 June 1890 Lioncoeur....................H. Howell-Poole

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Duke de Vigne.............B.P. Searle Earl Charteris..............E. Hoggan-Armadale Viscount Lascelles......Arthur Raynor Glaucus Rio.................Wallace Moir Guido Rienzi...............William Fenton Pierre Daudet..............Charles Hargrave Garton.........................A.E. Maskell Alphonse.....................James Adams Heloise........................Alice Raynor Duchesse de Vigne......Gertrude Lesage Lola.............................Laura Hansen Florette........................Etta Claire Mere Verite..................Emily Turtle The revised adaptation did not improve on A Child of Chance. Howell-Poole received a poor review in the Daily News who judged it ‘the sort of melodrama familiar to the audiences of minor country theatres’ (13 June 1890, p. 6). The Era concurred, saying that the play was ‘destined for provincial consumption’ (14 June 1890, p. 8). The comic magazine, Judy, made a cruel play on the name of the adaptor: ‘Those who didn’t see it don’t know How-ill-Poole-y it was done’ (25 June 1890, p. 303). Wearing notes that this version was first performed in Glasgow in February 1889. MULLIN, 293 WEARING (1976), II, 46 1901 The Sin of a Life Unlicensed adaptation of Wanda (1883) by Walter Reynolds Princess’s Theatre, Oxford Street Marquis de Sabran.............Charles Warner Duc de Noira......................Maurice Mancini Prince Ego Vasarhley.........Cooper Cliffe Prince Lilienhohe...............Cecil Morton Yorke Karl von Kaulnitz...............C.E. Collings Dr Greswold.......................R.S. Boleyn Otto....................................John Grayling Carl.....................................W.F. Fletcher Deinstner............................Cecil Frere Sig. Tolmaci.......................A. Lingray Sig. Rosturo.......................R. Nicholls

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Wanda................................Kate Rourke Princess Ottilie...................Mrs Lancaster Wallis Countess Olga Brancka......Janette Steer Mlle Peppinette..................Jessie Huddleston Frau Holmann....................A. Stafford Gela....................................Elie May Bela....................................Master Garnet Vayne The Athenaeum observed that Reynolds was making ‘one more attempt to take a place among West End houses’ (5 October 1901, p. 462). According to Nicholl, several of Reynold’s dramas were destined for provincial theatres (see V, 541), but Nicholl does not list this adaptation as Reynold’s. Wearing notes that there were eighteen performances at the Princess’s Theatre. BOLTON, 239–40 MULLIN, 351 WEARING (1981), I, 122–3 1908 Under Two Flags Unattributed abridged adaptation of Under Two Flags (1867) Lyceum Theatre Matinée performance, 10 March 1908 Bertie Cecil..... Mark Blow Cigarette.......... Ida Molesworth Under Two Flags formed the centrepiece of ‘Ouida Day’, a matinee variety show designed to raise money for the Daily Mirror Memorial Fund; all the artistes gave their services free. A former member of A.B. Tapping’s Company, Molesworth had played the part of Fuschia Leach in a production of Moths at the Lyceum, Ipswich, 17–22 February 1896. 1913 Under Two Flags Adaptation by Arthur Shirley Lyceum Theatre, London Opens 29 October Bertie Cecil..... Lauderdale Maitland

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Chateauroy...... Henry Lonsdale Cigarette.......... Tittell Brue Venetia............. Grace Denbeigh Russell The play had a very successful run, closing on 13 December. Playgoer noted that Under Two Flags ‘is arousing as intense an interest and enthusiasm as unbounded as if it were the finest of modern plays’ (November 1913, p. 58). BOLTON, 238

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Index

Abbott, H. Porter 79 aestheticism 26, 41 Ainsworth, Harrison 14, 43 Ainsworth, William Francis 14 ‘Algeria Fifty Years Ago’ 64–5 Allen, Grant 122 A.L.O.E. 17, 18 Ambrosini, Richard 4, 9, 31, 35 anarchism 133, 145, 172 Animal World 22 Arendt, Hannah 179 Armstrong, Nancy 38, 46, 51 Austin, Alfred 178 Beau, Adolphe 116–17, Fig 1.1 Beckett, Arthur à 56 Beerbohm, Max 1, 4, 39, 121–2 Belgravia 22, 25, 110–12, 114 Benedict, Barbara 47, 48 Bennett, Arnold 2, 4 Bentley, Richard 16, 55–7 Bentley’s Miscellany 14, 54–7 Besant, Walter 29 Biddle, Drexel 29, 31 Bigland, Eileen 30 Blunt, William Scawen 31, 165–6, 176 Boer Wars 1, 31, 175–6, 179 Boumelha, Penny 112 Bourdieu, Pierre 1 Braddon, Mary E. 16, 18, 22, 29, 110–12 Lady Audley’s Secret 16, 112 Bradley, Hayley Jayne 6–7, 24 British Army and Navy Review 17, 55–8, 59, 64 Brooklyn, Hartbury 84 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 15, 101 Burgett, Bruce 45 Burgin, G.B. 122–4 Burnand, Francis C. 22, 61 (and see Fig. 6.1) Burne Jones, Edward 178

Burton, Richard 16, 27 Calverley, Mary 148, 149 Cameron, Col. George Poulett 66–8 Romance of Military Life 67–8 Camus, Antoine 66 Cardwell, Sarah 85 Carmichael, Montgomery 32, 33, 35 Cawelti, J.G. 125–6 Chamberlain, Joseph 166, 176–7, 179 Chapman & Hall 6, 14, 15, 16–17, 20, 22, 25, 31, 64 Chatto & Windus 1, 15, 16–17, 20, 22, 24, 25, 28–9, 31, 35, 54, 109–10, 114, 115, 117, 121, 222 Cherbuliez, Charles Victor 158 Chesterton, G.K. 30, 50 Chute, John C. 85–6 Cockerell, Sydney 33, 131–2, 141, 143, 144 Cohen, Margaret 46 Colby, Vineta 102 Colonna, Ada 107 Contemporary Review 24, 147, 148, 149 Corelli, Marie 7, 24, 25, 30, 34, 39, 109–28 The Silver Domino, or Side Whispers, Social and Literary 118–19 ‘A Word About Ouida’ 110–15, 120–21 Cosmopolitan 29 Cowen, Frederick Hymen 19 Crispi, Francesco 150–52, 153, 166, 174 Cross, Nigel 18 Cvetkovich, Ann 48 Daily Mail 33–4, 35, 117 Daily Mirror 34, 35, 117 Damon and Pythias 61 David and Jonathan 55, 59, 67–8 Davidson, Cathy N. 45, 46 Davidson, Clara Dixon 173 Dickens, Charles 47–8, 49, 50

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Disraeli, Benjamin 177, 178 Dobson, Joanne 45, 46, 49 Douglas, Ann 45 Dowling, Linda 100 Edgar, D.W. 85 Elliott & Fry 27, 117, Fig. I.1 Elwin, Malcolm 3, 4 Federico, Annette R. 117, 125–7 Felski, Rita 112–13, 127 Ferrero, Guglielmo 174, 181 Fiske, Colin 13 Fortnightly Review 34, 147, 150, 153, 159, 172 Frith, James 55–6 Furedi, Frank 8 Galitzin-Incontri, Marchesa 133 Gallagher, Catherine 128 Galton, Frederick 113 Garnett, Constance 133 Gaskell, Elizabeth 47, 49 genius, female 7, 112–14, 127–8 Gentleman’s Magazine 25, 147, 148 Gilbert, Pamela K. 3, 4–5, 69, 70, 125–6 Goldman, Emma 173 Gosse, Edmund 70 Grace, Marion 86–8 Grew, Raymond 167 Grimm, Herman 149 Grosfils, Mme. 31, 32–3 Guidi, Angelo Flavia 169 Hagar, Lisa 26 Haggard, H. Rider 110, 122 Hall, Stuart 15 Hamilton, Henry 7, 74–7, 79–85, 90 Harris, Frank 34, 35, 150 Hendler, Glen 41–2, 43, 47, 48 Henley, William Ernest 165–6 Hobhouse, Stephen 141 Hobson, J.A. 176, 179 Hollingshead, John 75, 76 Holt, Shani Hodges 9 homosexuality 54–5, 70 homosocial desire 54, 67–9 Humane Review, The 132, 142, 143 Humanitarian, The 132, 142

Humanitarian League 132, 142 Humanity 132, 142 Hume, Hamilton 60 Humpherys, Anne 123 Huysman, J.K. 165 Idler, The 122–4 Illustrated London News 34 Italy (see also Ouida, life in Italy, and Italian politics) Italian foreign policy 152, 174–5 Italian peasantry 46–52, 148­–9, 168, 170–71 Italian royal family 2, 22–3, 24, 168–9 James, Henry 3 Japan 2, 133, 144 Jerome, Jerome K. 122–3 Jewsbury, Geraldine 16, 56–7, 68, 64 Jordan, Jane 4, 6, 7, 14, 16, 147 Joshua, Essaka 99 Jung, Carl 44 Kandola, Sondeep 7, 19 Kenworthy, J.C. 143 King, Andrew 4, 95, 98, 106, 126, 147 Kipling, Rudyard 173, 175, 178 Labouchere, Henry 117 La Fontaine 17 Lang, Andrew 110 Langdale, Dorothy 85 Lavaleye, Emile De 150 Lawrence, George Alfred 6, 17, 53–4, 60 Guy Livingstone 17, 54, 60 Leavis, Queenie 3 Lee, Elizabeth 3, 27, 168­–9, 172 Lee, Vernon 4, 7, 34, 50, 93­–107, 110, 133, 168 Le Queux, William 35 Linton, Eliza Lynn 122 Lippincott, J.B. 15, 16, 18, 20, 31, 117 Lippincott’s Magazine 22, 35 Litton, Marie 75, 76, 90 Lombroso, Cesare 113, 118, 153–4 Lotteringhi della Stufa, Lotario Lotteringo, see Stufa, Lotario Lotteringo Lotteringhi della

Index Lyon, W.F. 88–9 Lytton, Edward Bulwer 6, 19, 27, 50, 53, 54, 58, 62, 79, 158–9 Ernest Maltravers 19, 62 Lucretia 19, 62 Lytton, Robert 27, 28 Macaulay, Rose 3 Macmillan & Co. 32, 35 Mallock, William 27 Maltz, Diana 8, 26, 31 Marryat, Florence 55 Marshall, Gail 99 Maude, Aylmer 133, 143 Melville, Herman 68 Billy Budd 68 Meredith, George 165 Merivale, Herman C. 75, 76­–7 mezzadria 148–9 Monkhouse, W.C. 93, 94 Moody, Nickianne 7–8 Moore, George 157 Morris, F. Sydney 25, 110 Morris, William 4, 101 Mudie’s Circulating Library 20, 73 Murray, Penelope 113 National Anti-Vivisection Society 132 National Review 35 Nevill, Lady Dorothy 27–8 New Life, The Fellowship of the 142–3, 145 New Monthly Magazine 14, 17, 55 New Woman, The 3, 37, 39, 41, 96, 106, 112, 127, 161–3 nihilism 134, 135, 145 Nineteenth Century 147, 155, 172 North American Review 96, 104, 147, 149, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 172 Nuova Antologia 20, 167, 169, 170, 176, 179, 180 Oliphant, Margaret 57 Orestes and Iolaus 59 Ouida adaptations, see Appendix 3 film 2–3

231 opera 2 theatre 73–91 anti-Semitism, and 4, 62, 135, 136, 171–2, 177–8 biographers 3–5, 13–14, 27, 29, 53, 117, 168 celebrity, and 1–2, 6, 109–28 Christianity, and 54–5, 131–2, 141–3, 154 conscription 8, 145, 147, 159, 173 copyright, and 14, 15, 16–18, 29, 35, 74–7, 85–6 cruelty to animals, and 17, 22, 137, 142, 143, 147, 160–61 death 35 degeneration, and 8, 113, 150, 152, 153–6, 178, 181 dramatists, and 73–7, 90 early life 13–16 essays ‘Blind Guides of Italy, The’ 172 ‘Cities of Italy’, 149, 152, 172 ‘Conscription’ 73, 159 ‘Crispi Dictatorship, The’ 151, 174 ‘Decadence of Latin Races, The’ 151, 174 ‘Dumouriez―As a Soldier of the Revolution, Guilty or Not Guilty?’ 56 ‘English Literature and the Book Trade’ 158 ‘Female Suffrage’ 123, 161–2 ‘Future of Vivisection, The’ 25 ‘Has Christianity Failed?’ 154 ‘Impeachment of Modern Life, An’ 147–8, 153 ‘Imperialismo Inglese’ 176, 178–9 ‘Italian Awakening, The’ 151, 175 ‘Italy of To-day, The’ 174 ‘Joseph Chamberlain’ 176–7, 179, 180 ‘Legislation of Fear, The’ 134n, 144n, 150–51, 172–3 ‘Lemaître on Dress’ 8 ‘Le Secret Du Précepteur’ 158 ‘L’Uomo Fatale’ 174 ‘Marquis de Rudini and Italian Politics, The’ 151–2

232

Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture ‘Misgovernment of Italy, The’ 151, 152–3, 154 ‘New Literary Factors’ 17, 29 ‘New Woman, The’ 3, 37, 96, 106, 123, 161–2 ‘Sins of Society, The’ 154–5 ‘Some Fallacies of Science’ 159–60 ‘State as an Immoral Factor, The’ 173 ‘Stray Thoughts on Some Military Ribbons’ 56 ‘Sulla Felix. A Word on the Victor of the Esquiline Hill’ 56 ‘System of Mezzadria, The’ 148–9 ‘Tendencies of English Fiction, The’ 17, 121, 157 ‘Twentieth Italian Parliament, The’ 152 ‘Ugliness of Modern Life, The’ 155–7, 163 ‘Vulgarity’ 154 ‘War’ 158–9 ‘William Scawen Blunt’ 166, 181 ‘Woman Problem, The’ 35, 161n ‘Word on the Practice of Duelling. Apropos de Brantôme, A’ 56 evictions 28, 30, 32 fiction Afternoon 25 An Altruist 145 Ariadnê; The Story of a Dream 7, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 93–109, 168, Fig. 5.1 Chandos 6, 15, 19, 21, 55, 57, 59, 62–3, 84 ‘Dog of Flanders, A’ 2–3, 24, 29 Don Gesualdo 26 Folle-Farine 17, 18–19, 78, 120 Friendship 21, 22–3, 24, 124 Held in Bondage (Granville de Vigne) 14, 54, 56 A House Party 25, 26 Idalia 15, 17, 21, 57, 78, 90 In Maremma 24, 110, 168 La Strega and Other Stories 29 Massarenes, The 31, 176 Moths 6–7, 23–4, 25, 50, 73–90, 114, 127, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137–8, 139, Fig. 4.1

Othmar 25, 132, 135–8, 144, Fig. 7.1 Pascarèl 19–20, 21, 30, 168, Fig. 9.1 Princess Napraxine 25, 26, 132, 133–8, 144 Puck 17, 18, 58, 78, 87, 90 Rainy June, A 25, 26 Signa 19, 20, 21, 49–50, 117, 168 Strathmore 6, 14, 15, 55, 56, 57, 59–62, 74, 78 ‘Tonia: A Story of Crime from Poverty’ 29 Tricotrin 17, 78, 89, 120 Two Little Wooden Shoes 35 ‘Umiltà’ 22, 114–15 Under Two Flags 3, 6, 15, 16, 17, 24, 35, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58–9, 64–9, 78, 90, 116, 117, 126, Fig 3.1 Village Commune, A 6, 9, 21, 24, 30, 39–40, 42, 44–9, 50, 145, 148, 163, 167, 168, 170–72, 178, 180, Fig. 2.1 Wanda 25, 132, 133, 135–6, 137, 139–40 Waters of Edera, The 30, 31 Wisdom, Wit and Pathos 25, 110, 115, Fig. 1.1 genius, and 7–8, 19, 21, 32, 96–8, 103, 106, 109–28, 141, 155, 161–2, 168, 181 homosociality between men, and 6, 53–69 imperialism, and 9, 25, 134–5, 140, 152–3, 156, 165–6, 173–81 Italian politics 149–53, 165–81 life in Italy 19–25, 27–35 life in London 14–19, 27–8, 53–9 modernity, and 8–9, 24, 28, 30, 41, 44–5, 49–50, 96–7, 98, 100, 101, 103, 116, 132, 135, 137, 139, 142, 147, 153–63, 165–81 New Woman, and 3, 37, 39, 41, 96, 106, 112–13, 120, 123, 126–7, 144, 161–2, 166 photographs 7, 27, 34–5, 110, 115–18 poetry 173–4

Index ‘Victoria R. & I. (31 December 1900)’ 21–2 posthumous reputation 2–4, 37–51, 53–4 pseudonym 55–9 readership 1–2, 4, 50, 53, 149–50 realism, and 40–44, 46, 50–51, 109–11, 125, 127, 157 relationship with father 14 relationship with mother 13–15, 19, 28, 30, 53, 118, 172 relationship with soliciter 17 romance, and 6, 41, 51, 53–4, 65–8, 93, 106, 109–10, 122, 144–5, 125, 168, 174, 177 science, and 8, 123, 147, 154–6, 159–61 socialism, and 8, 39–40, 41–2, 44–5, 142–5, 147, 151, 154–5, 156–7, 161, 163, 172, 174 third sex, and 96, 97, 106, 127, 162 translations, and 2, 9, 20n, 23, 26n, 35, 67n, 114n, 124, 152, 175, 176, 180, Fig. 9.1 Victoria, Queen, and 1, 31–2, 175, 177–8 vivisection, and 25, 126, 143, 163 women’s suffrage, and 8, 109, 123, 125–6, 144, 147, 161 Oulton, Carolyn W. de la L. 6, 54–9, 61, 67 Paget, Lady Walpurga 21, 24, 30 Pareto, Vilfredo 153 Pemble, John 167–8 Phillips, Celia 14–15 Pinero, Arthur Wing 75, 77 popular culture 1, 4–5, 9, 13, 37–8 Poster, Carol 38, 39, 42 Powell, Anthony 2 Punch 8, 22, 59, 87, 116 Pygmalion and Galatea 95–6, 98–100, 102–3 Pykett, Lyn 8, 31, 120, 123, 127, 128 Radway, Janice A. 115 Revue des Deux Mondes 22, 152 Risorgimento 19–20, 149, 167–8 Robin Goodfellow 16

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Robinson, Mary 107, 168 romantic friendship 53–69 Roosevelt, Priscilla 133n, 136 Rose, Jonathan 2 Ross, Janet 23, 28 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 95, 101, 102, 103 Ruskin, John 2, 4, 24, 49, 50, 100, 104, 142, 171 Russ, Joanna 40 Russia 2, 8, 26, 88, 131–45, 151 Salt, Henry S. 8, 132, 142–3 Sambourne, Linley 116 Sand, George 45, 158, 170 Sargent, John Singer 168 ‘Scenes of Franco-Arab Life’ 64 Schaffer, Talia 3, 8, 26, 39, 43, 67, 68–9, 115, 162–3, 165 Schroeder, Natalie 9, 38, 74, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 54, 55, 66 sensation novel 6, 17, 37–9, 42–3, 44, 77–8, 87, 110–11, 114, 126, 179 sentimental, the 5–6, 21, 30, 41–51, 171 Sergi, Giuseppe 180–81 Shakespeare, William 80, 97, 113, 116 Shorter, C.K. 29 Showalter, Elaine 38 Sketch 29, 116 Smyth, Ethel 107 Sparks, Colin 5, 15 Stead, W.T. 147–8, 153, 163 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 44, 46–7 Street, George Slythe 4, 121 ‘Strapmore! A Romance by Weeder’ 22, 59 Stufa, Lotario Lotteringo Lotteringhi della 22–3, 24, 28, 35, 93 Sutherland, John 64 Swinburne, Algernon 178 Symonds, George Addington 54, 69 Tauchnitz, Baron von 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 26n, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35 Tchiatcheff, Pierre and Emilie de 133 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 1, 4 Thomas, Moy 76 Thompson, Nicola D. 56, 125 Tillotson, W.F. 26, 27, 28 Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau 25–6, 172

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Tinsley, William 14, 15–16, 53, 54 Tolstoy, Leo 8, 131–2, 141–5 ‘Bethink Yourselves’ 144 Family Happiness 144 ‘First Step, The’ 143 Kreutzer Sonata, The 144 Resurrection 131, 143 Tompkins, Jane 43–4 Unwin, T. Fisher 30, 31, 34, 176 Verga, Giovanni 29 I Malavoglia 171 Vicinus, Martha 106 Villa, Luisa 166 Vyver, Bertha 30 Wade, Florence 86–8 Whistler, J.A.M. 163

Whitehall Review 22, 114, 117, 147 Wilde, Oscar 1, 4, 48, 54, 100, 101, 124, 133, 147, 159, 165 Vera; or The Nihilists 133 Williams, Raymond 113 Will-o-the-Wisp 58 Winter, John Strange 120 Wolseley, Field-Marshall and Lady Garnet, 159, 173 Woman’s World, The 159, 147 Woolf, Virginia 17, 162 World, The 22, 57, 117 Yates, Edmund 22, 57 Yellow Book, The 121 Zanardelli, Giuseppe 34–5, 171 Zola, Emile 110 Zorn, Christa 102