Ouida Centenary Conference

This one-day conference calls for a re-appraisal of ‘Ouida’ (Louise de la Ramée, 1839-1908), the prolific Victorian novelist whose literary career spanned five decades, in which she wrote twenty-six best-selling novels, eleven volumes of short sto...

This one-day conference calls for a re-appraisal of ‘Ouida’ (Louise de la Ramée, 1839-1908), the prolific Victorian novelist whose literary career spanned five decades, in which she wrote twenty-six best-selling novels, eleven volumes of short stories, five novellas, two collections of essays, and over sixty articles on literature and the arts. Ouida’s early fiction was criticised for pandering to new constituencies of readers (‘easy reading for totally uncritical minds’), but following her permanent move to Italy in 1871 her novels took on a new maturity of style and subject matter and were admired by Ruskin and Henry James. In her essays and correspondence Ouida addressed issues of literary production, in particular the commercialisation of fiction, and the obsolescence of the three-volume library edition; Italian politics and culture; and the moral censorship of English fiction. Her own novels, which did deal, defiantly and persistently, with topics such as adultery, conjugal rights and marital rape, anticipated the much more open discussion of sexual morality by succeeding generations of novelists of the fin-de-siècle and early modernist period. Always to a degree a cultural outsider, Ouida’s feminist engagement was nothing if not complex. Notably, she held strong views about the New Woman, and in 1894 argued publicly with Sarah Grand in the North American Review.

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