lunabee34 | Probably only interesting to me, but

I did a reread of all the biographies of Ouida back to back so that I could compare/contrast them and chart the progression of the way she's portrayed in them.

Lee’s biography is the first, published in 1914 following Ouida’s death in 1908. I genuinely do not understand Lee’s motives for writing this biography. Monica Stirling says that she was friends with Henry James, but I can’t find any evidence that Lee ever met or interacted with Ouida in any way; perhaps she intensely disliked her from what she’d read of her in the press, but her distaste for Ouida seems to largely stem from James’s dislike of her. Lee’s biography is incredibly mean spirited; she has almost nothing good to say about Ouida and what little she does is very begrudging. Her goal seems to be to discredit and dismiss Ouida; from my twenty-first century vantage point, it reads like a lot of sour grapes to me, but who knows?

Lee introduces the ideas that Ouida attempted to act like her heroines (dressing like them, etc.) and that she lived in a kind of fantasy world, ideas that most of the other biographers will repeat. She is inordinately focused on Ouida’s looks and continually calls her ugly; I’ve seen pictures of the woman, and while I don’t think she’d ever be called a great beauty, she’s not the repulsive horror Lee would have us believe. She insists that Ouida is humorless; Yvonne Ffrench and Eileen Bigland echo that notion, and I just don’t get it. Her books are really funny, and she herself is often witty. In one letter, she suggests to an acquaintance that she’ll come back to her home town incognito and make fun of herself to see what people say which sounds full of humor to me. I just refuse to believe that so many important and famous people would hang out with her for so long if she were a dour stick in the mud. Even after assuring us all that Ouida is self-absorbed and vain and incapable of truly being a friend, Lee has to admit that she had a bunch of them and that some of the most famous and respected men in England were part of her salon and lifelong friends with Ouida (she has to admit it, but, boy, does she not see the attraction LOL).

Toward the end of Ouida’s life, she was wrongly evicted from a home she was renting; the sons of her landlord destroyed her belonging and stole items that were never returned to her (like letters and manuscripts). Ouida won multiple court cases against her landlords but never recovered any of the money or possessions owed her; the cases became one component of her bankruptcy. Lee paints the altercation with her landlord as Ouida’s fault, a miscarriage of justice that none of her other biographers repeat.

Lee makes the statement that Ouida thought every man was in love with her (which I’m pretty sure Bigland repeats) but offers no evidence to support that claim. (Several of her claims, in fact, are unsupported by any evidence that she provides; some of the later biographers go on to repeat those claims without offering any evidence either.) In her thirties, Ouida fell in love with the man who lived next door to her. The spent almost every day together for about ten years, but Ouida didn’t realize he was already in a relationship with a married woman, Mrs. Ross. When Lee discusses Ouida’s love life, she makes sure to let us know that Ouida must have imagined that her neighbor Stufa could ever be interested in her (like at length and disgustingly; didn’t we know Ouida was too repulsive to ever garner male attention?), and she only mentions Ross very obliquely as a factor.

Lee’s assessment of Ouida the writer is no less scathing than her judgment of Ouida as a person. She thinks Ouida is a hack, basically. Lee finds Ouida inaccurate and repetitious, and almost nothing Lee has to say about her fiction writing is positive. Lee does concede that Ouida has some gifts as a critic and as a writer of prose essays.

The one redeeming factor of Lee’s biography is that she includes copious amounts of Ouida’s letters that would be very difficult for me to obtain otherwise.

The second biography is by Yvonne Ffrench in 1938. Ffrench says outright that she has nothing new to add on the biographical front (and she’s 100% right about that; she does a fair amount of plagiarizing of Lee, down to the very sentence structure at times). Her stated motive is that she’s going to offer a perspective on Ouida that’s more removed from her own timeframe. She’s much more sympathetic to Ouida and puts much less emphasis on her love life than Lee does (I think Lee devotes a whole chapter to the Stufa debacle). Ffrench even seems to call out Lee at one point when she says that people who believed that Ouida controlled the way her mother dressed (so as to serve as a foil for Ouida’s costumes) were just being malicious; that’s pretty much word for word what Lee writes at one point. Ffrench also seems more interested in showing herself to be a good writer than Lee (more poetic turns of phrase, etc.).

Ffrench thinks Ouida is a good writer despite her inaccuracies, and she’s willing to admit that Ouida wasn’t a lunatic for thinking an unmarried man who paid her constant attention might want to marry her. Unfortunately, she agrees with Lee that Ouida was rude and arrogant and vain and so terribly, terribly ugly. Ffrench also introduces the idea that Ouida was a misanthrope (which Bigland latches onto), an idea that seems super bizarre to me. When she’s old and penniless she withdraws from society because she’s embarrassed by her circumstances; that’s not being a misanthrope. I have no doubt that if she’d remained financially solvent, she’d have been holding salon until the day she died at the dinner table.

The third biography is by Eileen Bigland published in 1950, and it is a doozy. First off, it’s just straight up plagiarized in so many places, and the further forward in history we come, the less patience I have for that. She starts off her biography by informing us that she’s not going to talk about Ouida’s psychology because she’s not a mental health professional and then spends the entire biography psychoanalyzing Ouida and diagnosing her with mental disorders. Bigland invents an elaborate metaphor in which Ouida almost has multiple personality disorder, letting one persona after another come to the fore while the real her is curled up in a ball in the dark and whimpering in fear (no really). I mean, at one point, she even writes “the hydra heads of Ouida” during the execution of this metaphor. She makes all kinds of claims with no evidence about what Ouida thought and felt and what other people around her thought and felt. She also includes a story about Ouida and Mrs. Ross that no other biographer mentions which makes me doubt it’s veracity (that one of Ouida’s dogs bit one of Ross’s kids and Ouida was a huge ass about it; I don’t doubt that Ouida would be a huge ass about it, but it’s a doozy of a story and I think Lee would have mentioned it if it had been true because she was so keen to paint Ouida in a terrible light). She also has all this weird stuff to say about Ouida’s sexual status; she’s insistent that Ouida died a virgin (which is probably true but her insistence is weird) and that she was a prude (which IDK but see no evidence), even going so far as to say that if Stufa had deigned to marry her, Ouida would probably have stayed a virgin. She has to admit that Ouida wasn’t imagining Stufa’s interest in her, but that’s about the only ground Bigland wants to concede.

This is a garbage book, a completely useless garbage book, and I hate every second I had to waste reading it, taking notes, and typing them up.

Ouida’s final biography is by Monica Stirling in 1958. Stirling’s stated purpose is to defend Ouida, to refute what other biographers have said about her and to reclaim her as an important author. On the whole, I think she’s successful in meeting these goals. Stirling is very sympathetic to Ouida.

Stirling sets up her biography by juxtaposing Ouida and Queen Victoria (a passage in Ffrench’s biography might be what gave her the idea to set the book up this way), and the structure just doesn’t work for me. The comparison/contrast seems really forced and doesn’t add anything to my understanding of Ouida. However, Stirling does one thing none of her other biographers do, and that’s add copious amounts of historical context about what was going on in Europe and other places around the world; she includes Ouida’s comments on many of these events. Stirling also gives us a deeper treatment of Ouida’s writing than we get in some of the other biographies.

She is much kinder in her depiction of Ouida’s love life. She strongly defends Ouida against accusations that she was making up Stufa’s interest in her; Stirling suggests that Ouida’s interest in the singer Mario was just her having a celebrity crush and not someone she was really painfully and ridiculously in love with from afar as other biographers suggest, and she totally glosses over Ouida’s third love, Lord Lytton (other biographers suggest that she wanted him to leave his wife and be with her, and at least one letter seems to give some credence to that idea). On the whole, Stirling's biography is the most balanced; it mostly repeats the biographical details from Lee’s biography but offers nuance by providing historical context and treats Ouida much more objectively than any of the other texts.

After I read these biographies, I was curious to see how Ouida’s life is represented in Ouida the Phenomenon by Natalie Schroeder and Shari Hodges Holt; until a new book on Ouida was published in 2013, this was the only book published about Ouida since 1958. The biographical portion of the book is very brief; most of it is devoted to analysis of her books. I was pretty surprised that Schroeder and Holt don’t reference Lee at all, not a single citation or footnote. She’s not in the bibliography. In fact, they seem to rely most heavily on Bigland, accepting her absurd claims that Ouida thought every man she met loved her, that she lived in a fantasy world, and that abandonment by her dad was the root cause of a mental illness that shadowed her life. Schroeder and Holt also state as fact an encounter with her father in Kensington Gardens that Lee dismisses as apocryphal. They make no comment about the merits or content of any of her biographies. I’ve got to admit I’m disappointed; I’d read the book before but not specifically to examine the biographical information, and I’m really surprised by how readily it relies on what I strongly believe to be the substandard scholarship of Bigland’s biography.

Ouida: A Memoir by Elizabeth Lee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Figuring out how to rate these biographies has been difficult. Lee so clearly dislikes Ouida and is so mean-spirited in so many of her comments that taking this seriously as a piece of scholarship is really difficult. I gave it the highest rating, not because I think it an accurate and objective portrait of Ouida's life, but because it's just so over-the-top in its malice that it's a real page turner.

This is Ouida's earliest biography. It was written shortly after her death and so Lee was able to speak with many of her friends and acquaintances and also get access to Ouida's letters (to and from). I can't find any evidence that Lee ever met Ouida, but they had acquaintances in common (most notably Henry James).

I can't figure out why Lee even wrote this book. Her stated purpose is to set the record straight about a writer who was often in the middle of swirling rumors; I'd say her true purpose is to discredit Ouida. She has almost nothing positive to say about Ouida, and even when she must make some grudging compliment, it's always backhanded. She presents Ouida as a horrifically unpleasant person with no redeeming qualities; she can't seem to understand why Ouida had friends or why her books were popular. If they'd ever met, I'd say Lee had an axe to grind, but since that doesn't seem to be the case, I really don't get the depth of her animosity.

In terms of her love life, Ouida is presented as being delusional in thinking any of the three men she fell in love with could ever love her back.

Lee insists that Ouida has no humor which is flat out belied by her writing and her own letters. Lee does include copious amounts of quoting from Ouida's letters, and in the places where Ouida is allowed to speak for herself, I think a truer picture of her comes through than in Lee's commentary.

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Ouida: A Study in Ostentation by Yvonne Ffrench

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the second biography of Ouida, and it adds almost nothing to our understanding of her. All the biographical details are drawn from Lee's account. In many places, the wording is close enough to be considered plagiarism.

Ffrench is more sympathetic to Ouida, and she even suggests that Lee's biography is malicious. She spends much less time on Ouida's love life and is much more willing to accept that in at least one case, Ouida's crush on Stufa, the man gave every indication of courting her (in contrast to Lee's insistence that Ouida just imagined that Stufa cared for her).

Ffrench does offer some new commentary on Ouida's body of work, which she seems to like much more than Lee does. Since her book adds nothing new biographically, Ffrench seems to have focused on criticism and on her own craft of writing. The book is written in a very poetic style; I get the sense that Ffrench was going for the quotable often as she was constructing her sentences.

Lee should still be the go-to for the biographical details, but I appreciate the softened tone and the way that Ffrench doesn't just blanketly accept the worst possible interpretation of Ouida's actions.

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Ouida: The Passionate Victorian by Eileen Bigland

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

What a worthless piece of crap.

This is Ouida's third biography, and it is straight-up plagiarized over and over again (mostly from Lee but also from Ffrench who was doing her own plagiarizing from Lee so it's sort of like a snake eating its own tail). It adds absolutely nothing to the biographical details. It does quote from a few letters which didn't make it into the others, but that's not enough to justify its publication.

Bigland starts off the book by saying that she isn't going to dwell on Ouida's eccentricities because she's not a psychologist and she doesn't want to speculate. Then she spends almost three hundred pages psychoanalyzing Ouida at every turn. She comes up with this bizarre metaphor of Ouida as an actor with multiple personas and the "real" Ouida buried deep inside because of fear and insecurity. That leads to sentences that include such phrases as "the hydra heads of Ouida." It's just wacky. Totally wacky. I see pretty much no redeeming value to this book. What's useful has been copied from others, and the rest of it is just her making stuff up with zero evidence for it. Lots of imagined conversations between Ouida and her mom or Bigland asserting that Ouida was thinking this or had X motivation for an action, and there's no evidence. None.

She's about as hostile to Ouida as Lee is. I cannot imagine why any of these writers say she has no humor or that she's a misanthrope. I don't get why her embarrassment at being called out in the papers as being poor is so astonishing to them. I don't understand why when a single man spends ten years hanging out with her every day and she thinks he's romantically interested in her, she's the one who's delusional. Like, Ouida had problems. Really severe problems. I think she probably had some kind of mental illness. She undeniably had difficulty navigating the social mores of her time; she had difficulty managing her money, spending well over her limit. But she wasn't this awful caricature of a human that Lee and Bigland insist she was (and even Ffrench and Stirling, her sympathetic biographers, often shade into this interpretation of her from time to time).

Bleck.

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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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I accidentally read Stirling's bio first instead of reading them in chronological order, and it's interesting to me how much better I think Stirling's bio is now that I've suffered through Lee and Bigland. LOL