Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée, 1839-1908) was a Victorian celebrity, non-conformist, and literary enfant terrible whose life and work conformed neither to dominant literary, cultural, or gendered conventions of the nineteenth century, nor neatly affirms our present-day expectations of Victorian literature. She was an internationally read, self-supporting writer, wholly uninterested in realism or the domestic sphere and sceptical of the New Woman, even as she lived alone, condemned marriage, or wrote happy divorcées. She pioneered the aesthetic novel and the desert adventure, synthesised sensation fiction, French romance, and social satire, mastered the Italian novel, and influenced the emerging Decadent movement. Her literary networks included Robert Browning, Richard Burton, Wilkie Collins, Marie Corelli, Oscar Wilde, and Max Beerbohm, and she drew admiration from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Vernon Lee.
Ouida shocked and delighted her audiences with her dandy guardsmen and happy adventuresses, her artists and revolutionaries, her depictions of aristocratic splendour and casual adultery. Known in turns for her ‘Swinburnian fleshiness’ and making Zola look ‘clean-tasted in comparison’, Ouida was lauded for her vitality and eloquence, but critiqued for infectious immorality. As a popular novelist and self-identified artist, she occupied an uncertain space in the literary imagination, and her relationships with publishers were—with the exception of her friend, Bernhard Tauchnitz— often volatile and disadvantageous. A libertarian, democrat, and individualist, her novels, short stories, and critical essays espouse cosmopolitanism, anti-imperialism, eco-criticism, and animal rights, but are also suffused by misogynist or antisemitic commentary.
Following her (now-contested) dismissal from the feminist canon, scholarly interest in Ouida has been resurging in recent years. Despite many excellent contributions from various fields, as a staple of the Victorian and pan-European literary landscape she remains crucially understudied. This Study Day aims to bring together scholars contributing to any aspect of Ouida scholarship, whether through recent and ongoing projects or at any point in the past. We want to contribute to building lasting networks of Ouida scholars and fans, facilitate dialogue and exchange, and make visible the vital work that is being done on a complex, sometimes confounding woman writer, yet which is also often scattered across disciplines and genres. Our aim is to consider how Ouida’s life and work challenge or complicate dominant meta-narratives of Victorian paradigms about gender, genre, culture, and identity, but also highlight and discuss Ouida’s legacy in collections and archives, as well as the practical and theoretical challenges of Ouida scholarship across time.
We hope this Study Day will invigorate the exchange of ideas and projects and provide a forum in which to celebrate an extraordinary Victorian personality, for example through a concomitant online exhibition or neo-Victorian fan perspectives. We aim to publish a collection of selected papers after the event.
Possible discussion topics include, but are not limited to:
- Ouida’s life: Langham salon, military friendships, Florentine circles, Ouida as a celebrity, her correspondences and friendships (with Burton, Blunt, Tauchnitz…), her biographies, etc.
- Ouida, her literary contemporaries, and the marketplace: M.E. Braddon, Marie Corelli, Vernon Lee, G. A. Lawrence, Ouida as inspiration or competitor, etc.
- Ouida and publishing: Chapman and Hall vs Chattoa and Windus, Tauchnitz, Heinemann, Lippincott, Review des Deux Mondes, serial publications, marketing, etc.
- Ouida as aesthete or decadent icon: proto-aestheticism, Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Algernon Swinburne, G.S. Street, Gabriele D’Annunzio
- Ouida across genres and modes: muscular adventure, sensation, social satire, New Woman fiction, romanticism vs realism, eco-criticism, political satire, etc.
- Ouida’s short stories and critical essays
- Ouida international: cosmopolitanism, Baden Baden, Paris, summer capitals, Italian novels, anti-imperialism, translations, reception (France, Italy, Japan, etc)
- Ouida’s politics: libertarianism, anti-authoritarianism, animal rights (horses and dogs, especially), New Woman debate, etc.
- Ouida and gender: Masculinity, masculine heroism, homosociality, potential queerness, femininity, female agency, misogyny, etc.
- Ouida’s afterlives: 20C collections, biographies, Belgian statues, Japanese animes, etc.
- Ouida in the archive: researching, collecting, teaching, and studying Ouida then vs now, etc.
We invite 20-minute papers and 10-minute flash presentations. Please send proposals of 200-300 words and a short bio to Frankie Dytor and Helena Esser by October 6th 2023, or direct any questions you might have to us. The Study Day will take place across two days to accommodate UK and US time zones.
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