Fin-de-Siècle Ouida: A New Woman Writing Against the New Woman?

Abstract

The novelist known as Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé, or, as she preferred to be known, Marie Louise de la Ramée—1839–1908) is an interesting case study in the context of the present volume. Having leapt to fame in the wake of the sensation boom of the 1860s and having earned a reputation as a ‘fast’ or shocking novelist, Ouida continued to publish novels and stories through the succeeding decades of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth; her last novel, Helianthus: A Prince of Europe was published posthumously in 1908. In the later stages of her career Ouida also became well known (and often much mocked) for the ‘Views and Opinions’ (as she titled the essay collection she published in 1896) that she expressed with increasing force in letters to newspapers and essays in the periodical press in both England and Italy (where she lived from 1871). Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century Ouida’s novels enjoyed great popular success with educated middle- and upper-class readers—including Queen Victoria, John Ruskin, and Oscar Wilde—and also with those who belonged to what Wilkie Collins called the ‘unknown public’. As a writer in Bow Bells (a weekly magazine aimed at lower-middle-class readers) remarked in 1882, ‘her works are as widely read by all classes of English society as those of perhaps, any living authors.’