Biography of Ouida

The Fine and the Wicked: the Life and Times of Ouida by Monica Stirling

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Oh, man. Reading early literary criticism and biography is so frustrating because nobody cites sources in a useful way! Stirling is all, "And then Ouida said this," or "Then Henry James said this about Ouida," or "One time at band camp, Ouida . . ." without telling me where she gets any of her information. Sometimes I can go to the bibliography she has at the end and figure out that she's probably quoting from a certain text but sometimes not.

Reading Stirling is a wacky ride. I mean, she explicitly says that her mission is to defend Ouida as an important author and to reclaim her works as entertaining and worthy of reading, but she goes over the top in attributing emotions and motivations to Ouida for which she has zero evidence. She's constantly saying things like (paraphrasing here): Ouida never looked a gift horse in the mouth, and if she had, she would only have commented on the beauty of its teeth. Stirling's prose is ludicrous at times; she's so eager to defend Ouida's behavior that her defenses sometimes don't make logical sense. She also does this weird framing thing where she pits Ouida and Queen Victoria against each other throughout the biography, and it's extremely off-putting to read.

On the other hand, lots of great pictures of Ouida and the houses she lived in plus good biographical details and lots of info about the people with whom she socialized and corresponded.

Ouida just makes me so sad. She was so brilliant, and she was so admired, and she ended up alone and miserable and poor at the end of her life. She had loyal friends even up to her dying day, but she manufactured so much of her own unhappiness through her inability to save money and her anger at the social humiliations she sometimes suffered when she couldn't keep her mouth shut or reacted poorly to what she perceived as slights. I have so much sympathy for her and so much admiration for how much she was able to accomplish despite both external and internal forces that were set against her.

Note to self: I made a mistake in re-reading Ouida's biographies; published in the 1950s, Stirling's is the latest, and I really should have started with Elizabeth Lee's (the earliest at 1912) to better chart the way Ouida's story changes (or not) as time progresses. That's not something I took note of when I read these biographies fifteen years ago.



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