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.
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...
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...
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
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:...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dorothy Richardson
In this book Richardson's heroine Miriam, now eighteen years old, has returned from Germany and is a resident teacher at Wordsworth House, a school in fictional Banbury Park, North London, run by the Perne...
Characters
Naomi Royde-Smith
The heroine (played by Thea Holme
) is an inexperienced, romantic, good-natured shop-girl living in the London suburbs, engaged to a good but prosaic man and suffering the harrassment and anxiety of poverty: she has...
Leisure and Society
Berta Ruck
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Berta Ruck
BR
relates with gusto a story about the composition of a novel with a particularly implausible romance story-line. Wishing she could defy verisimilitude as confidently as Ouida
(who could get away with murder and murdered...
Paul Bailey opens his introduction by quoting extensively from a scene in Ethel M. Dell
's The Top of the World which features a Proud Beauty and a Faithful Retainer. He also links Angel with...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sarah Tytler
Clearly delighted with the opportunity to mix in literary circles, ST
recorded her personal observations of these authors in Men and Women Met by the Way, the final 100-page-long section of her family autobiography...
