ABSTRACT

This chapter focusses on Ouida as a woman artist, presents how a new portrait of Ouida herself might be crafted and how one of her novels where a woman artist is the protagonist. It explores Ouida's initial encounter with Italy, her late essays on Italian or British politics and Italian, French and British literature. The chapter reveals Ouida gradually moved from a commercial conception and practice of art, which disavowed its commercial nature, to a political, altruistic, view and practice where the artwork's impact upon society was more important than personal financial gain. Just a year after Ariadne, Ouida started to write protest material for the Whitehall Review and, the following year, a stream of letters to The Times. By the 1880s Ouida will have found what was really important to her as a woman artist: the public service ideal that in the twentieth century came to form the ethical core of the professional.