“In revolt against reason”: The Politics of Romance in Ouida’s Popular Fiction

• Helena Esser

Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée, 1839–1908), a best-selling popular author and queen of the circulating libraries, was frequently lauded for the larger-than-life exuberance and vitality of both her prose and her imagination. Indeed, Ouida, with her commitment to “[a]ll that is heroic, all that is sublime, impersonal, or glorious”, adopted and vigorously defended romance over the paradigmatic Victorian realism by which nineteenth-century literature has been measured throughout the twentieth century. Whereas critics and contemporaries could not deny the dazzling verve, innate showmanship, and engrossing force of her storytelling, they also refused to acknowledge her talents as literary ones or those of an artist. To this day, scholarship often adopts an apologetic or derisive stance towards her work. As such, responses to Ouida reveal crucial and persistent biases both in scholarship and the contemporary market. This essay investigates how Ouida’s penchant for romance, cultivated across genres such as sensation, adventure and social satire, informed her work as an aesthetic mode of narration that externalised intrinsic ethics, politics and ideals, but also how it shaped her reception by publishers, audiences, and scholars.