Ouida

Artist Info

OuidaBury Saint Edmunds, England, 1839 - 1908, Viareggio, Italy

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n82225768

Ramée, Marie Louise de la [pseud. Ouida] (1839–1908), novelist, was born on 1 January 1839, at 1 Union Terrace, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, the only child of Louis Ramé (d. 1872?) and his English wife, Susan Sutton (d. 1893), who named her Maria Louise. Her father was an enigmatic man, a native Frenchman; his marriage certificate records his occupations as tailor and gentleman, and in addition he is known to have taught French. Maria Louise's education apparently consisted completely of her father's tutoring. As her father's frequent absences grew longer and more mysterious, she romanticized him as a Napoleonic spy, changing her name to Marie de la Ramée to suggest a vague aristocratic background. Louis Ramé disappeared but is thought to have died in Paris street fighting in 1872.

Precocious as a child, de la Ramée began to write, producing Idalia (1867) at the age of sixteen. She published her first story, ‘Dashwood's Drag, or, The Derby and What Came of It’, in Bentley's Miscellany in 1859 under the auspices of her medical adviser's cousin, William Harrison Ainsworth. Seventeen stories later, her first novel, Held in Bondage, appeared in Bentley's in serial form in 1863, entitled Granville de Vigne: a Tale of the Day under the pseudonym Ouida, the childhood mispronunciation of Louise that had become her nickname. The pseudonym came to have a particular force, one that was seized upon by de la Ramée, as she strove throughout her life to distinguish between her private and public identities on its basis. This is made clear in a letter of January 1900 to her European publisher, Baron von Tauchnitz:

I just see in your catalogue that you append another name to Ouida (Louise de la Ramée.) Please take it out. I have no other name in literature. And it should not be put in inverted commas ... Besides, I love Ouida. It is my very own, as children say. I don't care for any of the other names I bear. (Jordan, 76)

After Sir Francis Burnand parodied her second novel, Strathmore (1865), in Punch, and Lord Strangford attacked it in the Pall Mall Gazette, Ouida became an established public figure. Her prolific, imaginative novels were admired for their fast-paced plots and atmospheric settings by such people as Bulwer-Lytton, Whyte Melville, and Sir Richard Burton. Many readers, however, criticized her factual inaccuracies, her redundancies, and her two-dimensional characters, including Byronic-type heroes. Her best-known work, Under Two Flags (1867), bears all of these hallmarks and went on to sell millions of copies in its single-volume ‘cheap’ format. The plot is certainly melodramatic, relating the adventures of the Hon. Bertie Cecil, a member of the Life Guards forced to fake his death and leave London to protect the honour of his younger brother. He enlists as a chasseur d'Afrique under the name Louis Victor, and his many acts of heroism are detailed at length. Having angered his commanding officer, he is about to be court-martialled when one of the camp followers, who has fallen in love with him, throws herself in front of the firing squad, saving his life, in time for the reprieve that follows as a result of his true identity becoming known. The effects of stirring plots such as these, combined with the popularity of Mudie's circulating library, the public appetite for Ouida's prurient romanticism, and her shocking revelations about upper-class and military life, ensured her success until her zenith in the mid-1870s.

De la Ramée lived and entertained lavishly at the Langham Hotel, London, on earnings averaging £5000 per year, until the eviction caused by her extravagances. Financial problems forced her to move to Italy with her beloved mother in 1871, living first in an apartment at the Palazzo Vagonville in Florence, then at the Villa Farinola at Scandicci, 3 miles from Florence. Mme Ramé died in 1893, to be buried in a pauper's grave at Allior cemetery in Florence, after which de la Ramée lived at the Villa Massonni, at Atna' Alessio near Lucca.

Probably her arrogance, vanity, idiosyncrasies, dramatic flair, and the other extreme oddities described in her biographies make as interesting reading as any of Ouida's novels. A woman whose slight build, large nose, undistinguished features, inauspicious colouring (brown hair, blue eyes), and diminutive stature detracted from her physical appearance, her vanity nevertheless caused her to order expensive dresses too short in the arms and skirt in an attempt to show off her small wrists and feet. The effort merely resulted in unfashionable and grotesque costumes. Often she would receive her visitors in the costume of the heroine of her latest novel, striking the artificial poses she imagined of her characters.

Snobbish, intolerant, and rude, de la Ramée became a difficult hostess and a demanding, insulting guest, yet she still attracted enough important people to hold a salon. As Lady Paget remarked of the quality of the guests at one of de la Ramée's parties: ‘[s]he has an extraordinary talent for forcing people to come’ (Jordan, 84). Certain of the unusual merit of her amateurish paintings, she pressed them on unwitting guests or acquaintances including that practised observer of human nature, Henry James. To her first biographer, Elizabeth Lee, James remarked that de la Ramée ‘was curious, in a common, little way ... of a most uppish or dauntless little spirit of arrogance and independence ... a little terrible and finally pathetic grotesque’ (Lee, 231). However, Lee, the author of Italian Hours, also claimed to admire ‘her original genuine perception of the beauty, the distinction and quality of Italy’ (ibid., 234) demonstrated in such novels as Signa (1875), Adriadne (1877), In Maremma (1881), A Village Commune (1882), and The Massarenes (1897). Most of Ouida's fiction was published in several editions and languages, as well as adapted for plays and operas.

In 1871 de la Ramée unwittingly initiated her own decline by engaging in a notorious ten-year affair with the marchese della Stuffa. This philandering member of an ancient Florentine family, a gentleman-in-waiting to the king, was also involved with Mrs Janet Ross, a society hostess of Florence, resulting in a series of embarrassing public scenes between de la Ramée and della Stuffa. As revenge for his refusal to marry her, Ouida published a roman à clef, Friendship (1878), vowing that every word of it was true. However, the negative public reaction to it diminished her already weak social currency, which was then permanently devalued by a direct snub from the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, in 1887. Her popularity as a novelist waned almost entirely after 1890.

Late in life, de la Ramée became passionate over various causes such as anti-feminism, the South African War, and animal vivisection. She also proclaimed her increasing disgust with the military, and with technological advances. Throughout her life she constantly avowed disbelief in any religion, writing to Lady Constance Leslie in 1907 that she regarded Christianity as an invention based on oriental myths in order to satisfy basic human needs and hopes, and that she deplored its claim to being the best or only religion.

From 1904 until her death de la Ramée lived in squalor with many adopted stray dogs in her tenement at Viareggio. Her dedication to these pets was perhaps the best index of her increasing eccentricity, as she indulged them with luxuries while starving herself; the local people called her ‘Crazy Lady with the Dogs’. In these years she was humiliated by lawsuits, debts, and the well-meaning attempts of friends and readers to ease her poverty. When sympathizers made a public appeal to the subscribers of the Daily Mail to donate to her relief, de la Ramée issued a furious denial that she suffered any want. Her few remaining friends, including Lady Paget, Alfred Austin, and George Wyndham, persuaded the prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, to offer her a pension. After considerable resistance, especially to the requirement of revealing her age for the purpose, in 1906 Winifred, Lady Howard of Glossop, finally persuaded her to accept the civil-list pension of £150 per year. Never strong, she contracted pneumonia and died of complications on 25 January 1908, unmarried and childless, at via Zanardelli 70, Viareggio, Italy. She was buried in the English cemetery at the Bagni di Lucca. There an anonymous female admirer erected a monument above her grave representing a reclining figure with a dog at her feet. A memorial drinking fountain with trough, designed by Ernest G. Gillick with a medallion portrait, and inscribed by Earl Curzon of Kedleston, was unveiled at Bury St Edmunds on 2 November 1909.

Ouida's last and incomplete novel, Helianthus, appeared posthumously in 1908. Although people read many of her forty-four works of fiction well into the twentieth century, it currently appears that only the essays in Critical Studies (1900) may retain lasting merit. Under Two Flags, however, was filmed three times in the early twentieth century, with the 1936 version, starring Ronald Colman and Claudette Colbert, best evoking the spirit of the novel. As Graham Greene put it:

How Ouida would have loved the abandon of this picture, the thirty-two thousand rounds of ammunition shot off into the Arizona desert, the cast of more than ten thousand, [and] the five thousand pounds which insured the stars against camel bites. (Walker, 1129)

Helen Killoran

Sources

DNB · E. Lee, Ouida: a memoir (1914) · M. Stirling, The fine and the wicked: the life and times of Ouida (1958) · E. Bigland, Ouida: the passionate Victorian (1951) · Y. French, Ouida: a study in ostentation (1938) · J. Jordan, ‘Ouida: the enigma of a literary identity’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 57 (1995), 75–105 · J. Walker, ed., Halliwell's film guide, 10th edn (1994)