[Review of] Helen Esser's Ouida (2025)

Over her long career, Marie-Louise de la Ramée (1839-1908), who wrote under the name "Ouida," produced twenty-nine best-selling novels, five novellas, and several short story collections, in addition to numerous essays and articles. Finding fans in John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, her work was translated into multiple languages and adapted for the stage — and later, for the screen. Yet, as Helena Esser notes in this thorough overview of her career, Ouida's position in the Victorian literary field is "complex and not seldom contradictory," a position that "reveals the tensions between the gender politics of literary production and reception in the nineteenth century" (1-2).

Uninterested in domestic realism or depictions of the middle class, Ouida's novels have on occasion been categorized as sensation fiction, but the rubric fits imperfectly. Ouida's work traversed settings and genres; she wrote adventure novels; depictions of the aristocratic salon and bedchamber; and tales of the Italian peasantry. The term "New Woman" can be traced to her 1894 essay of the same name, published in The North American Review — but her acid critique of certain aspects of nineteenth-century feminism led twentieth-century feminist scholars, eager to expand the canon to include women writers, to all but ignore her. [1] Esser's valuable gambit in this book is that, feminist and gender studies having moved beyond the limitations of second-wave feminist scholarship, we can approach Ouida's work with fresh eyes. Esser's interest "lies in how Ouida treats gender binaries, femininity, (toxic) masculinity, consent, female agency, and commodity culture." This book seeks to "make visible how Ouida so often challenges […] and subverts binary Victorian notions of gender" (20).

Over five chapters, Esser tours Ouida's work, emphasizing the ways in which her shifting styles and genres inform her representations of gender. Chapter 1, "Beau [sic] Sabreurs: Homosocial Masculinity," focuses on her early novels. In novels like Held in Bondage (1867) and Under Two Flags (1867), the plots of which hinge on gallant soldiers whose affective bonds are challenged by the introduction of a woman to the scene, Ouida thinks through "evolving ideas of heroic masculinity" in the aftermath of the Crimean War (20). Attending especially to Under Two Flags' protagonist Bertie Cecil, the British soldier who joins the French colonial forces in Algeria, Esser points to the ways he "anticipates and defies later versions of the chivalric adventurer" that appear in the works of H. Rider Haggard and G.A. Henty. Cecil's combination of aristocratic indolence and matchless courage, she argues, make him a representative of Ouida's ideal hero. As an Englishman serving the French colonial project, Cecil is detached from his national identity in ways that invite a critique of French colonialism from a British standpoint while advancing Ouida's commitment to individualism. "While Ouida [...] valorized the Victorian masculine ideal of chivalry and leadership by virtue of birth and gallantry," writes Esser, "she was [...] critical of those nationalistic projects in which that ideal was effectively instrumentalized" (47).

Esser's second chapter, "Soldiers and Spies: Women in Masculine Spaces," investigates central female characters in Under Two Flags and Idalia. Here Esser focuses on the eponymous Idalia and on Cigarette, the youthful vivandière of Under Two Flags and perhaps the most commented-upon character in Ouida's oeuvre. Though one is a vibrant cross-dressing teenager living among the French colonial troops in Algeria and the other an aristocratic woman deploying her femininity as an instrument of spycraft in the interest of Risorgimento politics, both fully inhabit masculine spheres of war and espionage, according to Esser. These female characters are not simply functioning as disrupters to male homosociality — in fact, both save the male hero. Esser takes from Foucault the concept of "heterotopia," in which actual spaces of a given culture can be "simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted" (Foucault, 1984, 3; cited in Esser, 55).[2] Esser uses the concept to delineate the masculine spaces traversed by Idalia and Cigarette, spaces in which these protagonists move relatively unconstrained by societal conventions of gender, throwing into relief the ways in which the colonial outpost and European corridors of power normally constrained women's lives. In this way Ouida enables an exploration of what Esser terms "the fundamental paradox of female identity." That paradox, as Esser describes it, could be understood as the tension that many of Ouida's characters experience between "the state of existing in a biologically female-coded body" and femininity as "the socially-constructed superstructure imposed on that body" (55).

In the third chapter, Esser takes up Ouida's mid-career novels, among them Moths (1880) and the canine-narrated Puck (1870): "[C]onceiving of Europe as a cosmopolitan interconnected sphere, [Ouida] draws on the figure of the Parisian courtesan in order to explore and interrogate female power" (81). At stake here is a crucial element of Ouida's place in the Victorian literary field: half-French, she not only saw herself as "a French novelist writing in English," but was often presented that way in the press and not always in a complimentary fashion. French novels were stereotypically represented in the mid-Victorian era as racy at best, morally corrupting at worst. Because Ouida's courtesans and "femmes galantes" understand that they must transform themselves into commodities in order to thrive, they produce an intriguing investigation of women's agency under industrial capitalism. Esser develops the historical and literary context of Second Empire France to situate these novels and Ouida's stylistic and thematic choices, pointing to ways in which French novelists from George Sand to Émile Zola and Octave Feuillet provided important intertexts, as did other well-known figures, such as the Countess of Castiglione. In Esser's view, "real celebrity courtesans and French aristocratic romances allowed Ouida to write sexually liberal and empowered women," but with an important twist: "[I]f Feuillet's ultimately conservative novels serve as a benchmark, she also 'out-Frenched' the French novelists." At the same time, argues Esser, these glamorous cosmopolitan characters become a site for the exposure of the "gendered power dynamics of commodity culture" (108).

The discussion of "femmes galantes" and the French contexts forms an effective segue to the fourth chapter, in which Esser takes up Ouida's relation to the "New Woman." Esser suggests that, while Ouida's relationship to nineteenth-century feminism has been complicated by recent scholarship, the novelist's criticism of the New Woman affected her reception by twentieth-century feminist literary scholars and haunts her reputation still. Esser then focuses on Moths, A Winter City (1876), Princess Napraxine (1884), and Guilderoy (1889), her readings of which add texture and depth to Ouida's feminist thought. Central to all of these texts is a substantial analysis of the institution of marriage; like many nineteenth-century feminists, Ouida is critical. But through her readings of these novels, Esser establishes that Ouida's critique of marriage is simultaneously congruent with the New Woman positions and, in some ways, more radical. Ouida's novels shock with their depictions of marital rape and divorcees who are happier freed of matrimony.

Early in this fourth chapter, Esser helpfully differentiates between feminism of the nineteenth century (and some of its twentieth-century iterations), and Ouida's complicated politics. The feminism that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century was a "democratic, bourgeois movement" that "clashed with Ouida's elitist views on aristocratic values and her rejection of state government" (110). An important insight from this detailed overview of Ouida's literary production has to do with her complex and often inconsistent political positions, insofar as they are discernible in her novels. Already in the early adventure novels, the complexity and contradictions of Ouida's politics and aesthetics are legible. "She was an individualist and avid libertarian who neither conformed to dominant literary, cultural, or gendered conventions, nor neatly affirms our present-day expectations of Victorian literature" (1), Esser writes. In explicitly refusing realism as a "dreary creed" that "will make a dreary world" (Ouida,"Romance and Realism," [1882], quoted in Esser, 102), Ouida's novels have perhaps seemed an ill fit with critical elaborations of the nineteenth-century English novel; however, as Esser points out, an expanded view that includes not only sensation fiction, but also adventure, romance and spy novels, as well as attending to cross-Channel literary relations, illuminates her work considerably. In the final chapter, Esser explores Ouida's critical essays in the context of some of her fiction, elaborating her aesthetic and social theories, as well as linking her work to fin-de-siècle Aestheticism. "She crafts for herself the female genius persona as artist-aristocrat and social activist," Esser explains, a fighter against all forms of oppression and an aesthete who believed in the social utility of art in an age of accelerating commodification of the artwork (147).

Esser relies throughout on a growing and rich body of scholarship on Ouida's work; her bibliography includes work by Andrew King, Pamela Gilbert, and Jane Jordan, among others, all of whom have done a great deal to increase our understanding of this once-neglected writer. There are, however, remarkably few book-length studies of Ouida's vast output as yet and this book constitutes a valuable contribution as both an introduction and, with its extensive bibliography, a provocation to further research. Esser's volume not only takes us on a tour, more or less chronological, of a long and prolific career, but also opens up important ways in which popular fiction — an appellation that, as Esser points out, Ouida would have protested — helps us tell an important and under-recognized story of the nineteenth-century literary field.

Notes

[1] The phrase "the New Woman," with the capitalization, first appeared in Ouida's essay "The New Woman," published in the May 1894 issue of The North American Review. It was a response to an essay by Sarah Grand, "A New Aspect of the Woman Question," published three months earlier in the same magazine, which described what Grand called "the new woman," but unlike Ouida, Grand celebrated the figure."

2] Esser cites the French original and gives the title in English translation ("Of Other Spaces").

Links to Related Material

Bibliography

[book under review] Esser, Helen. Ouida. Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2025.

Foucault, M. "Des Espaces Autres." Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité 5 (October 1984): 46-49.

Grand, Sarah. "A New Aspect of the Woman Question." The North American Review (March 1894): 270-76.

Ouida [Marie-Louise de la Ramée]. "The New Woman." The North American Review (May 1894): 610-19.

Created 24 September 2025; last modified 29 September 2025