THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY
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Ouida: Wilde’s lionne and ‘The
Woman’s World’
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Rita Severi (University of Verona) |
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First published in Anglistica Pisana VI, 1-2, 2009,
pp.131-140. Originally presented at the International Conference ‘Ouida in
Exile: The Stubborn Pilgrim’, Bagni di Lucca, 30th-31st August 2008. Here republished September 2010 by kind
permission. |
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Apparently Ouida’s books had no place in Wilde’s library
or, at least, they did not survive to be put on sale at the auction of all of
his goods which took place on Wednesday, April 24, 1895[1]. In his letters, in late October 1887, when
he was already busy planning and organizing the new layout for the feminine
magazine that would become ‘The Woman’s World’, Wilde complained to the
actress Mrs Bernard Beere: ‘We have no lionne
now but Ouida’[2]. In the 1880s Wilde was invited to Ouida’s salons at the Langham Hotel in |
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In recent years much has been written about Oscar Wilde’s
journalism and, in particular, his editorship of ‘The Woman’s World’, about
which there are articles by Laurel Brake[5],
Anya Clayworth[6],
Diana Maltz[7],
myself[8],
and others[9]
which, respectively, deal with gender, journalistic writing, aesthetics,
social studies, and descriptions of its contents and its reception. All of these critical comments have
contributed a new chapter to ‘Wilde’ studies which needs to be expanded to
include what I’d like to call Wilde’s feminism which is – and this is not the
proper time to discuss it – very much alive, evident and directly connected
to the project of ‘The Woman’s World’ .
From Wilde’s letters and from the articles that were published in the
journal we can assume that the editor took pains to make the enterprise of
the feminine magazine work along the lines of his own political,
anarchic-socialist ideas as well as of his literary, hedonistic-aesthetic
beliefs[10]. The journal, which Laurel Brake has
admirably defined as a ‘ “class” periodical with a readership and discourse
determined by shared characteristics, primarily gender, education and
wealth’, contains all this and even more, but within the precincts of ‘The
Woman’s World’ it seems very difficult to find and distinguish what she calls
‘the introduction of male homosexual discourse’[11],
especially in the illustrations which show young men in languid poses, which
she selects as proof of her argument.
The ‘poses’ made up the typical self-fashioning of the ‘artistic’ male
of the 1890s, whatever his sexual inclinations (even Gabriele D’Annunzio
often describes himself and is portrayed in languorous poses), and such
illustrations were quite common and frequent in most magazines of the period
which reproduced photographs of contemporary writers (e.g. the cover of Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ‘90s)[12]. Besides, what would be the point? Wilde was
addressing women and, as his ‘Literary and other Notes’ show, light-heartedly
‘acting’ in a feminine way: guiding, encouraging, suggesting, accepting both
sides of an argument, writing vivacious reviews with the same effortless,
brilliant voice that made him a favourite guest in the best houses of
Mayfair. |
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Being Wilde the perfect gentleman with the ladies, his
offer to contribute to a new magazine for the cultivated woman was most often
gladly accepted by his feminine acquaintances who received retribution not
only in money but also in praise. In the
first two volumes of ‘The Woman’s World’, 1887-89[13],
George Fleming (Julia Constance Fletcher) who serialized her novel, The Truth about Clement Ker, F. Mabel
Robinson (7), Amy Levy (8), Ouida (4), Olive Schreiner (3), Clementina
Black(2), Edith Nesbit(2), Mathilde Blind(2) were the most frequent
contributors. Ouida wrote two articles
for the journal in 1888 when Janet Ross, whom she had considered a rival for
the love of the Marchese Della Stufa and her enemy (she revengefully
satirized her plight in Friendship,
1878), submitted an article entitled ‘A View near Taranto’ (1888, p. 542).
But the magazine was hospitable, and Ouida wrote two more articles in 1889. |
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In March 1888 ‘The Woman’s World’ published Apropos of a Dinner[14]
where Ouida, who had taken offence because the painter W.P. Frith in his Reminiscences (1887) remembered having
dined with her at a table where ‘smoking began with the oysters’, flippantly lists some of the worst
habits of English society: smoking, want of politeness, too many dinner
parties and too few salons, too much food and, then, of course, people who
attend these social gatherings and write about them in their memoirs. She’s particularly outspoken against
smoking because besides being ‘silly and injurious’ it separates the men from
the women: a ‘boorish habit’[15]. According to Ouida the painter had
remembered incorrectly because at her table smoking would be allowed, if it
really must, after the rôti. The article, although lively, is mere
gossip and received a letter of protest from W. P.
Frith, who was one of the first artists, in 1881, to portray the young
Oscar Wilde, surrounded by a small crowd of adoring gazers at the Royal
Academy, in a painting called ‘A Private View’. |
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Later in 1888 Ouida contributed a longer article on The Streets of London[16]
which, for the joy of all the city’s inhabitants decrees ‘that London is the
worst-lighted capital in the whole of Europe’; its ‘streets are dreary’;
almost every London house has ‘the aspect of a menagerie combined with a
madhouse’ with awful basements, ‘subterranean places in which nothing but the
soul of a blackbeetle can possibly delight’; they are smelly with the ‘odours
of cooking and eating’. ‘There is too
much eating in all |
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In ‘Literary and Other Notes’ (December 1887) where Wilde
reviews the poems of Constance Naden, A
Modern Apostle, about a young clergyman who preaches Pantheistic
Socialism and converts everybody except the woman he loves, he cleverly
underlines the fact that ‘the external forms of modern life are hardly, as
yet, expressive of that spirit (…) Art, however, is a matter of result, not
of theory’. In this field, Ouida’s
ideas are very simple and clear: ‘I am inclined to believe that the monotony
of ugliness in the London streets – buildings constructed without an idea,
without meaning, without a single grace, without any charm of light and
shade—repeating its own nullity again and again and again , as an idiot
repeats its mumbling nothings – affects the minds of those who live amongst
it (…) and I believe that the hypochondria of English men and women is due
much less to climate than it is to the absence of beauty about them in their
daily lives, and to the unenjoying haste at which they live’. When beauty is displayed freely in society
the public becomes ‘a sharer’ and ‘a gainer’ in its bounty. Unfortunately, though, ‘the populace’,
imagined by Ouida, will partake of airy of beauty but not of its substance
once it returns to its unhealthy and dreary quarters. |
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In another article Ouida denounced the evils of war[17]
by saying that ‘with every century of age there is added to the world the
lust of war’ and that ‘all the oft and over-vaunted progress of the human
mind chiefly results in the arming of nations one against an- other.’ She was
very opinionated, but often mistaken.
Italy to her appeared to be incessantly preparing for war and thereby
‘she cripples and impoverishes every class of the nation’. The |
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Field-Work for Women
is the last article Ouida published in ‘The Woman’s World’ in 1889[18],
quaintly illustrated by two reproductions of the author’s oil paintings that
show ‘Contadino’s house on the Greve river, Scandicci’ and ‘Contadino’s
house, Val De Gesca, Tuscany’. She has
been observing the Tuscan contadine[19]
and has concluded that field- work is much healthier for women than factory
work. She has noticed that a certain
fifty-five year old peasant woman, a widow, who cultivates her land, ploughs
the fields, digs and hoes and plucks out weeds and, when she sits down,
plaits straws, is better-looking than a Duchess. ‘She is like a matron of old stepped out
from the eclogues of Virgil or the pastorals of Theocritus. ‘This woman has led a wholly natural life;
obeying natural instincts, enjoying natural affections and fed by the pure,
fresh, sweet air of a sunny hillside.’ ‘In Italy’, she adds, ‘field work is
largely done by women’. She concedes
that rural life can be brutal, and Zola in La Terre has drawn a vivid, terrifying picture of the ‘bestial
life’ of those toilers without any concession to hope. George Sand in her novels of rustic life,
instead, ‘has kept within the just medium’.
The Tuscan contadina is made
to fit into a literary frame, but she remains real, a living example for
Ouida of the self-sufficient and confident woman. ‘Let it be distinctly understood, and
repeated as often as possible, that field-work does not degrade women in any
way, does not unsex them, does not expose them to any especial temptations,
but does render the probabilities far greater of the children whom they bear
being robust in frame and healthy in constitution’. Perhaps she should have written ‘of the
surviving children’. |
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Her readable, varied, opinionated, even prejudiced
contributions to ‘The Woman’s World’, which constitute the beginning of her
collection of essays published in 1895 with the title Views and Opinions, were certainly received with graciousness and
gratitude by the editor who, in 1889, when Ouida’s novel Guilderoy was published, wrote a cheerful, elaborate and
diplomatic review for the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ (May 17,1889, p.3). |
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Lord Guilderoy who lives in a Tudor mansion and is full of
ennui and indifference to women of his class is encouraged to marry by his
sister Hilda. He had loved the lovely
Duchess of Soria, a Venetian, but now she bores him with her letters. One day, during the hunt, he sees some
young farmers pursuing a fox cub who is saved by a young girl. The girl with the fox cub takes refuge in a
shelter and the farmers try to break in.
Guilderoy irrupts upon this scene and saves the young girl. She is Gladys Vernon, like Miranda, the
daughter of a lonely scholar who has given up all his possessions and wealth,
after 400 miners died in one of his mines in South Wales. Guilderoy discovers Gladys and is
immediately struck by the purity of her beauty: he sees a Gainsborough, a
Romley, a Carolus Duran! He proposes to her and she accepts, although her
father speaks of the marriage unfavourably because she’s only seventeen. Once married, Gladys and Guilderoy travel
to |
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Ouida uses the same plot even in her shorter tales, for
instance in Two Little Wooden Shoes
(1874). Other standard plot elements
are intricate relationships; catastrophes and exaggeration or hyperbole of
situation, description, character and voice.
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Wilde in his review of Guilderoy
for the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ states that ‘Ouida is the last of the
romantics. She belongs to the |
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The friendly relationship between Ouida and Wilde, but
also between Wilde and English society suddenly ended when Oscar was put to
trial for ‘gross indecency’. It wasn’t
only Ouida who abandoned Wilde: there is not one note of feeling addressed to
him by any of the writers of ‘The Woman’s World’. With the exception of Ada Leverson, the
women deserted him. The
freedom-fighter, economically emancipated, lover of mercy Ouida in 1896 wrote
to her friend Mrs H.C. Huntington, who lived in |
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‘I have written three comedies
in one year’ he said to a friend of mine, and my friend replied: ‘A great
exercise of memory!’ The Italian
papers assign him a much higher place than that which he held in London
society.’[22] |
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Yet the memory of Oscar Wilde and, in particular, of his
works lingered in Ouida’s receptive mind.
In a novella, An Altruist,
published in 1897 with four essays[23]
there are quite a few reminiscences or intertextual parodies from Wilde’s
masterpieces, from The Soul of Man
Under Socialism (1891) to The
Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
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The altruist Bertram is a wealthy young man who follows
socialist ideals. He falls in love
with the daughter of a poor laundress, Annie Brown, but, painfully, soon
realizes that her accent is impossible and that ‘her ankles are thick’[24]. He does not adopt the extreme solution of
the poet Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who, according to Wilde’s brilliant
memoir in Pen, Pencil, and Poison,
justified his murder of his lovely sister-in law, Helen Abercrombie by
saying: ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.’[25],
but he does leave her immediately. He
is then followed by Annie’s brother Sam, just like Sybil Vane’s brother James
follows in pursuit of Prince Charming Dorian Gray, but in Ouida’s parody
there are no consequences. Bertram,
though, is constantly challenged and defeated in his battle of ideas. His butler, the clever Critchett is found
stealing by Bertram and defends himself with the excuse that ‘I have only put
your theories into practice, sir,’[26]. Critchett hints at those
anarchic-socialist-Christian theories held by Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism that said of the poor ‘Why should
they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? (…)
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original
virtue. (…) a poor man who is
ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real
personality and has much in him. He is
at any rate a healthy protest’[27]. Critchett also resembles the butler Lane in
The Importance of Being Earnest
whose views on marriage, for instance, are considered ‘lax’, which makes
Algernon consider, in the upside-down world of the play, that ‘Really, if the
lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?
They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.’[28],
which is exactly what Bertram expects from Critchett. |
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Bertram, who is a man with aspirations and a dwindling
bank account, suddenly inherits a fortune from one of his Italian relative,
who on his dying bed dictated a letter to his priest leaving all his
possessions to the English young man with the final recommendation: ‘Take
care of my horses and my dogs’. The
Italian relative shares Ouida’s love of animals – she was known, in Italy, as
‘la signora dei cani’[29] –
and sounds very much like Ouida herself probably staging in the novel the
very personal relationship she entertained (in her mind) with Oscar
Wilde. At first, Bertram wants to
donate everything to |
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Southwold, Bertram’s uncle encourages him to go to |
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As for Wilde the writer, O’Sullivan stated that he ‘had
little influence on the youth of the 1890s, and I have often thought that he
did not care for their ideals. He was
sympathetically nearer to Ouida, that genius among women, than to the lucid,
rather cynical Max Beerbohm, engaged in reducing human impulses – so far as
his characters ever are impulsive – to unsentimental terms. Wilde was not afraid to be sentimental.’[32]
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The American writer Carl Van Vechten, an enthusiastic
reader of Ouida and a follower of Oscar Wilde, believed that ‘the author of Lady Windermere’s Fan caught the trick
of smart comedy dialogue from the talk of Lady Cardiff (a portrait of Ouida’s
friend, Lady Orford), in Friendship’[33]. |
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Although we know that she died in poverty, Ouida had it
all: fame while she lived and an enviable literary afterlife for some time[34]. In the writings of Ronald Firbank she is
transformed into a camp figure as the model for the ludicrous impersonations of the many popular writers that appear
in his novels[35]. Although Ronald Firbank never openly
acknowledged his debt to Ouida in his writings or his letters, her style – and
especially her keen interest in fashion – resonates throughout his
stories. For instance, in Caprice (1917), a novella about a
canon’s daughter, Sarah Sinquier, who leaves her provincial home in
Applethorp, for |
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At the turn of the century, Ouida’s books are rarely read
and very few readers know her today by her full name. Yet Ouida’s influence on late Victorian and
‘indirectly on an entire band of Edwardian novelists’[38]
is startling. |
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Wilde, instead, whom she did not fully appreciate,
continues to live in Naples[39]
the gay life of Lord Orkish in Firbank’s play The Princess Zoubaroff (1920), a title borrowed from characters
belonging both to Wilde (Vera Sabouroff in Vera or the Nihilists) and Ouida (Sergius Zouroff in Moths). |
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v Rita Severi, one of THE OSCHOLARS’
Italian editors who teaches English Literature at the University of Verona
and was Visiting Professor in the USA in 2010, has recently published Rinascimenti. Shakespeare &
Anglo/Italian Relations, Bologna, Patron, 2009 and the
contribution "Astonishing
in my Italian":Oscar
Wilde's First Italian Editions, in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed.
by S. Evangelista, London-New York, Continuum, 2010, pp.108-123 and
pp.314-317. For more on this, click here. |
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