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.
BR
was a keen theatre-goer. She cried unashamedly at a revival of one of the stage versions of Ouida
's Under Two Flags.
Ruck, Berta. An Asset to Wales. Hutchinson.
160
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...
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.
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...
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
In 1951 Canadian novelist Robertson Davies
made this book the centre of a fictional anecdote: a distinguished professor bequeaths to his grand-daughter a box of battered old books (Lady Audley's Secret, Mrs Henry Wood
Literary responses
Florence Dixie
FD
received many letters of appreciation from individual readers: from a sailor on a British warship and a soldier with the army in South Africa, as well as from Ouida
and Marie Corelli
, to...
Author summary
Stella Gibbons
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...
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...
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
Textual Features
Margaret Oliphant
Oliphant develops an extended critique of her chief bugbears, Mary Elizabeth Braddon
(the leader of her school
), Rhoda Broughton
(not by name, but as author of Cometh Up As a Flower),...
Textual Features
Jean Plaidy
The Carr novels present perhaps JP
's heaviest concentration of plot-elements which would have been familiar to Eliza Haywood
, Penelope Aubin
, Ouida
, and a host of popular fictioneers of every century and...
Textual Features
Mary Webb
Critics have called Dormer Old House itself the protagonist of this novel; its description fills the opening chapter. Like the country house in MW
's previous book, it takes a gothic colouring from the unhappiness...
Textual Production
Elaine Feinstein
EF
has carried out a great deal of scholarly commentary of a kind best calculated to be useful to readers (though she did not finish her MA thesis on nineteenth-century sexual fantasists like Ouida
and...
Textual Production
Stella Gibbons
The novel concerns a foundling raised by a widow and a spinster who run a grocery shop in Bruges. It was probably influenced by Ouida
's Two Little Wooden Shoes.
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury.
219
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...
