ABSTRACT
Ouida and Marie Corelli are at first glance easily comparable: both had long careers as popular and independent women writers responsible for earning their living during a period of cultural anxiety about such status, both were frequently viewed by their contemporaries as unpleasant personalities greatly concerned with their own self-importance, both were associated with impossible romance and pretentious and erratic learning. They even shared the same publishers at different times. Twentieth-century critics later connected them through their anti-suffrage stance and their powerful negative portrayals of New Women. While neither writer can be reclaimed or reconstructed by present-day scholars as feminist in any simple way, recent critical discussions acknowledge the complexity of their attitudes to changing gender roles at the end of the nineteenth century.2 Nonetheless, Ouida and Corelli appear irrevocably divided by their attitudes to morality and sexuality, the one risqué when not outré and the other conservative when not prudish. Corelli in that sense makes a curious advocate for Ouida.
