Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Ouida
-
Standard Name: Ouida
Birth Name: Marie Louise Ramé
Self-constructed Name: Louise de la Ramée
Pseudonym: Ouida
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ouida
published 44 volumes of fiction, primarily novels, but also novellas and short stories for both children and adults. Often publishing more than one book a year, she was also a prolific essayist who wrote on matters of politics and literature. Her first, three-decker novels, from the 1860s, often centred on the adventures of military men and were characterized as sensation novels. After she moved to Italy in the early 1870s, she wrote a number of novels concerned with the conditions of the government and population (especially the poor) of that country.
), Rhoda Broughton
(not by name, but as author of Cometh Up As a Flower),...
Textual Production
Alice Meynell
She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen
inferior to Charlotte Brontë
, accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Vernon Lee
In her first essay, Lee offers a summary analysis of the English novelistic tradition. Judging them especially, though not entirely, on their treatments of morality, she evaluates writers including Jane Austen
, Maria Edgeworth
,...
Reception
Vernon Lee
This book lost Lee the friendship of others who had admired her Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. Broken friendships included those with Oscar Wilde
(refigured as the character Posthlethwaite), Jane
and William Morris
GJ
's personal preferences are evident in the favour she showed to works with strong moral messages. She disliked sensation novels and was equally disapproving of detailed descriptions of physical romantic exchanges between characters. For...
Literary responses
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin
The Saturday Review called Once and Again a great advance upon any previous effort of the writer's.
Kirk, John Foster, and S. Austin Allibone, editors. A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors. J. B. Lippincott.
The young Vernon Lee
praised this novel enthusiastically in an Italian article published in La Rivista in October...
Friends, Associates
Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
In London JFLW
associated with writers such as Marie Corelli
, Ouida
, and Violet Hunt
. Oscar
, an emerging celebrity, introduced his mother to the city's artistic circle.
Textual Production
Henry James
Although HJ
is best remembered as a novelist, he was also a prolific and insightful critic of literature and the arts. Over the course of his career he reviewed many novels by British women writers...
Literary responses
Jean Ingelow
The Athenæum remarked that in spite of many faults in construction, we had seldom read a more charming novel of the domestic kind.
Pearl Richards (later JOH
) read widely as a child and adolescent, and her parents' liberal views (and considerable fortune) meant that she could pursue her tastes in both the lending libraries and the less...
Literary responses
John Oliver Hobbes
More recently, Margaret Maison
characterised The School For Saints as a strange mixture of Disraeli
, Hardy
, Ouida
, and Meredith
. . . and there are even echoes of the old bigamy novels...
Publishing
Sarah Grand
SG
's use of the phrase New Woman in The New Aspect of the Woman Question (an essay in the North American Review, part of an exchange with Ouida
) has been claimed by...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
SG
published Ticky, a fantasy novel inspired by Ouida
.
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury.
SG
was a gifted comic writer whose lively, parodic first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, was such a success that it has tended to eclipse her later achievements. Much of her writing was inspired by...
