ABSTRACT
Although best known to modern readers as a writer of popular or middle-brow fiction, Ouida also sought to intervene in contemporary political and social debates in the more serious periodical press. Like many, perhaps most, Victorian middle-brow fiction writers she had a long association with periodicals. However, it was not until the late 1870s, during her lengthy sojourn in Italy, that Ouida became known for her ‘views and opinions’ (as she titled her 1895 collection of essays), when she began to publish essays and reviews and became a regular writer of letters to newspapers and periodicals. Between her first short essay in the Whitehall Review in April 1878 and June 1906, Ouida published over 60 on a wide range of topics in English, American and – occasionally – Italian periodicals. In the Gentleman’s Magazine, the North American Review, the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary Review, the Nineteenth Century and Oscar Wilde’s The Woman’s World, Ouida lectured the world in general on the nature of modernity, the vulgarity of modern life and literature, the evils of science, war and conscription, on animal rights, the folly and inevitability of female suffrage and the causes of the rise of anarchism and socialism, varying her ‘topics and emphases’, as Andrew King has noted, ‘according to the periodical she was writing for’.1 Demonstrating that new authority which Jane Jordan has detected in Ouida’s writings following her move to Italy,2 she lectured her English compatriots on the decline of their literature and the misrepresentations of their press, in the latter case focusing on the British press’s misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Italy and Italian politics. This essay will touch on all of these aspects of Ouida’s journalism, beginning with what W.T. Stead described as Ouida’s ‘trenchant and unsparing’ criticisms of ‘the
kingdom which to European Liberals represents the most brilliant triumph of the idea of nationality’.3
