Ouida: The Passionate Victorian by Eileen Bigland

Ouida (1839-1908) was born Maria Louisa Ramé in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds to an English mother and a largely absent French father.  An eccentric child, she rapidly outgrew East Anglia, let alone her birthplace.  She was delighted when in 1857 her mother agreed to move with her to the heaving metropolis of London.  The good people of Ravenscourt Park (a suburb to the west) were rather perplexed by this strange creature: “she had not, so to speak, grown into her nose, her straight, mouse-coloured hair  hung in rats’ tails down her back, and she walked with one small, delicate hand resting on [her dog's] collar.”  Oblivious to her neighbours’ discomfort, Ouida (a childhood nickname) quickly built a career as a successful writer.  There was no starving in a garret for her – she immediately struck literary gold with her work for Bentley’s Miscellany and soon became a firm favourite with the reading public.

Her first full-length novel, Held in Bondage (I don’t recommend Googling it), was an instant hit, establishing her as one of the most bankable authors.  She was only too aware of her own value, and would demand astronomical advances for future novels, terrorising publishers with her imperious and peremptory manner.  Needless to say, popular success did not mean critical acclaim, but a damning review simply served to send her sales figures through the roof.  Buoyed by her success and rapidly-growing reputation, Ouida quite reasonably decided that she needed a literary salon.  She quickly bundled up her mother and other belongings and moved them to the more fashionable West End.  Madame Ramé had a little say in the matter: “Towards her mother she displayed the patience tolerance of a superior being dealing with a beloved but cretinous dependent.”

Ouida attracted yet more controversy and publicity by openly consorting with the Brigade of Guards, inviting them to her rooms for lively drinking and smoking sessions.  Such scandalous experiences fuelled her imagination and inspired her exotic military novel Under Two Flags, featuring the oft-imitated heroine Cigarette.  The author’s ego was vastly inflated by the attentions of these soldiers and she soon came to believe that they existed purely to serve her.  When reprimanded for talking loudly all the way through a vocal performance at a refined dinner party, she responded tartly: “As I talk better than others, I ought to be listened to, even if singing is going on.”  Her many eccentricities converged in Puck, a novel featuring a Maltese terrier, an “arch and precocious little creature who discusses the art of entertaining.”

When Ouida moved to rooms at the Langham Hotel, she received visitors in her heavily-curtained, candlelit room.  They would encounter a “tiny figure in an enormous bed, scribbling for dear life with a quill pen on large sheets of violet-tinted notepaper.  A bemused Oscar Wilde and Wilkie Collins were one day greeted with a long monologue from Puck, in which Ouida assumed the role of the sagacious canine.  It was on story on which Wilde dined out for some time.  Ouida thought dogs superior to humans and never tired of telling stories of their feats of bravery and ingenuity.  She was also partial to handsome men, but invariably terrified them with her eccentricity and intensity.  One object of her affections was Mario, an Italian tenor, whose fame spread throughout Europe.  At a royal performance of La Favorita, Ouida threw him an ostentatious bouquet containing an ivory cigar case, and “nearly brained the poor man.”

Frustrated by Mario’s lack of reciprocity and society’s general failure to acknowledge her genius, Ouida headed to the continent, finally settling in Florence.  She was now earning around £5,000 per year (getting on for half a million in today’s money) and was able to comport herself with great style, occupying the grand Villa Farinola, which commanded one of the loveliest views of Tuscany.  Although the local people were delighted  with the liberal quantities of cash she squandered, the ex-pat community were horrified (but also transfixed) by her rudeness and vulgarity.  She fed the neighbourhood pooches with prodigious portions of meat, eggs and cream; no wonder, then, that one of her early projects was to commission a dog cemetery in the grounds of the villa.  Her own dogs were encouraged to dine at the table and would lap cream from priceless Capo di Monti teacups.  Anyone who had the temerity to suggest that such prandial arrangements were inadvisable would find themselves summarily dismissed.

Although her expenditure was gaining a terrifying momentum, her book sales were falling off.  To compound matters, her elderly banker eloped with a ballet dancer, owing millions of pounds to his clients.  Her personal life was also in crisis after a very public spat over a married man further alienated her from polite society.  She became increasingly isolated and reclusive, experiences which inspired the character of Princess Zouroff in Moths.  Perhaps it was this insight into her character than made Moths a roaring success, temporarily reviving her fortunes.  Her triumph soon turned to anger, however, when Mudie’s Circulating Library threatened to withdraw the title from its catalogue, and her publisher responded by breaking up the type.  The sensibilities of delicate readers (mainly reviewers) were outraged by the frank portrayal of marital violence and divorce.  She eventually calmed down and set to work on In Maremma, an Italian peasant novel that brought both commercial success and the admiration of the Theosophists.  All was well, and she had again fallen in love, this time with Robert, Earl of Lytton, son of prolific author Bulwer-Lytton and himself a writer under the pseudonym of Owen Meredith.  The fact that he was happily married with children was no obstacle to the tenacious Ouida, who believed theirs was a great spiritual union.

It was only a matter of time before Ouida’s bubble was pricked, at least in terms of her finances.  When creditors started calling in their accounts she had nothing with which to pay them.  Her immediate response was to demand more money from her beleaguered publishers, but they were by now thoroughly fed up with her.  She was forced to move herself and her long-suffering mother between an endless succession of hotels, before finding a more affordable villa.  Her mother’s death, coming shortly after the premature expiry of Lytton, plunged Ouida into a pit of despair, affecting her ability to earn the money she so desperately needed.  Unable to afford the burial expenses, it was rumoured that she kept Madame Ramé’s lifeless form in the house for many weeks.  She moved on to a hotel in Lucca, but was quickly ejected by an irate manager after inviting every dog in the neighbourhood to a tea party of bread, milk and meat.

There was another flurry of literary success with The Massarenes, a novel Vernon Lee dismissed as “an overdrawn, lurid picture of the vices, manners, and customs of the so-called smart set of the period.”  This was exactly what the reading public wanted, however, and the author was soon able to take another villa.  Her tenancy was short-lived,  as she was violently evicted by bailiffs when she again fell into her perennial financial difficulties.  Exhausted and shocked, she crawled away to a local hotel and tried to regroup.  Her health deteriorated rapidly, and she soon became quite blind and deaf.  Back in England, some of her profession were aghast at the parlous state into which she had fallen and did their best to help: a thankless task.  Marie Corelli, who she couldn’t abide, arranged a public subscription through the Daily Mail, an act which the furious beneficiary demanded she revoke.  Attempts to grant her a Civil List Pension were also rebuffed as she thought such provision fit only for “superannuated butlers”.

Ouida’s struggle with the world finally ended after a bout of pneumonia on 25 January 1908, and she was laid to rest under a bier which carries a recumbent figure of herself, with a dog lying loyally at her feet.  Her popularity continued after her death through the new medium of cinema.  Perhaps the most high profile example was Under Two Flags in 1922, starring Rudolph Valentino.  As with many women writers of the period, her novels were seldom read after the ‘Great Divide’ of 1914.  However, recently there has been much critical interest in her work and a number of scholarly editions of her novels have emerged (see below).  Personally, I’m hoping someone will publish a Ouida Reader.  There is certainly a need for a literary biography from one of the eminent academics who are now researching and evaluating her oeuvre.  Bigland’s book, published in 1950, is based on anecdotal evidence and no sources are cited.  Consequently, it is more of a portrait than a biography, but enjoyable nevertheless.  They style is decidedly iconoclastic, which seems to be the norm for portaying Victorian writers at the time.  I suspect I often repeat myself in these posts by saying that an author’s life resembles a character in sensation fiction; in this case, I think even Wilkie Collins would balk at such a fantastical creation.

Ouida: A Passionate Victorian by Eileen Bigland (Jarrolds, 1950)

Valancourt Books have recently published In Maremma and Under Two Flags, both edited by Natalie Schroeder.  Moths is available from Broadview Press, and I am reliably informed that Andrew King is editing an edition of The Masserenes for Pickering and Chatto.

Related posts:

1. Moths by Ouida
2. The Mysterious Marie Corelli – Queen of Bestsellers
3. Victorian Sex Goddess: Lady Colin Campbell and the Sensational Divorce Case of 1886
4. Mrs Humphry Ward by John Sutherland