Ouida

“Ouida” was the pen name of prolific Victorian novelist and essayist, Marie Louise Ramé (1839-1908), who was born in provincial Bury St Edmunds to a French father and English mother. Initially mistaken for a male writer, Ouida wrote novels about male aristocratic friendships —never, strictly speaking 'sensation novels', but always containing sensational elements. Because of this, Ouida quickly gained a louche reputation in London society, establishing a salon at the Langham Hotel to which she invited almost exclusively male guests, many of them officers in the British army.  She continued to defy convention by moving permanently to the outskirts of Florence in the early 1870s. Tuscany provided Ouida with fresh subject matter (chiefly the plight of the Italian peasantry, but also, increasingly, the commodification of the woman artist).  Her remote residence also enabled Ouida to criticise aspects of British culture, notably politics, from afar. In spite of Ouida’s disparagement of fellow women writers and feminist campaigners of the period through her non-fiction, her later novels consistently focus on the legal powerlessness of married women, and the prevailing sexual double standard that underpinned matrimonial law. Ouida herself never married. She was completely self-reliant in dealing with her publishers, refusing to employ a literary agent, but as a consequence did not protect her literary estate as well as she could have done. Despite receiving a Civil List Pension and payments in advance of her final (unfinished) novel, Ouida died in poverty at her lodgings in Viareggio, her handsome tomb at the Anglo-Italian cemetery in Bagni di Lucca apparently paid for by an anonymous female admirer.