Ouida, a significant figure in Victorian literature, enjoyed a readership spanning continents. Greats such as Ruskin, Wilde and Tennyson read her books as much as those who used subscription libraries. Max Beerbohm called her one of the miracles of modern literature, whilst her publishers made enough from her sensation novels to subsidise others’ publications well beyond her death. The snobbish damned her with faint praise. Later works of political and literary criticism had their admirers, but were soon forgotten. Nowadays her books can be a difficult read, not because of the cascades of adjectives so much as the dated sexist, racist and anti-Semitic attitudes.

Her life and character remain something of a conundrum. Once she had achieved fame–living extravagantly, loving men unrequitedly, and pampering up to thirty dogs in personally ruinous ways–the stand-out features became her departures from the norm. Her self-professed misogyny lay alongside frankness about taboo subjects such as affairs and prostitution. She fought against colonialism but lived a large part of her life as an expatriate.

As a result of this complexity, exploring her work as it relates to her life story resembles a game of Genius Solitaire, where the contrary card directions of two packs require simultaneous play. Certainly, others have worked through the decks. Her first biographer, closest to the story in 1914, coyly obliterated all evidence of the nature of Ouida’s relationships with men–after all, she wrote about a spinster who guarded her right to privacy. Ouida’s second biographer focused on her ostentation and the Byronic identification that drove her misanthropy (ffrench 1938). The third thought Ouida shrewd, egoistic, and driven by “hydra-headed” competing desires (Bigland 1951). Far outstripping the second and third works in terms of balance, Stirling (1958) chose a general historical framework, tied Ouida’s political writing to her childhood experiences and accessed new sources in Italy. Nonetheless, she kept to the most obvious aspects of Ouida’s unconventional spinsterhood.

If you take Ouida’s own claims seriously that she was more French than English, then a fifth new path opens up through the cards. Such an approach requires a return not just to the account of her life that is closest to Ouida’s lived experience (Lee’s 1914 biography), but also to contemporaneous memoirs, traces of her life in the press, and historico-social events related to her youth. Ouida’s romantic heroes and heroines, romans à clef and later political writings did not leap onto the stage without a launch pad of experience and rehearsal. An exploration of her father’s attitude to the Bonapartes uncovers the seeds of her fights against injustice. Recognising that she was the sun to her mother’s moon reveals reasons for her grandiose streak. Stripping her biographies of their coyness and their criticisms throws light on Beerbohm’s “unique, flamboyant lady,” sensitive, enthusiastic, creative, and very witty. Unfortunately, her lack of modesty, desire for a loving relationship beyond marriageable age, and the merciless home truths she published following any disappointment made her many more enemies than friends. The outcome, besides an impoverished old age and lonely death, was a reputation as a writer of extravagant melodramatic romances with all evidence of a critical stance expunged.

NOTE: Both the above summary and article were edited by Professor George P. Landow, for The Victorian Web.