ABSTRACT

In 1875, as part of her attempt to launch a career in European letters, the 19-year-old Vernon Lee began writing a series of unpaid articles on leading English, German and French women novelists for the upmarket Italian journal La Rivista Europea. She informed her mentor, the popular (but now forgotten) novelist, Henrietta Jenkin, that in preparation for it she was reading the novels of ‘the celebrated continental novelist from Bury St Edmunds, otherwise Louise de la Ramée, future Marchesa Lottaringo Lottaringhi della Stufa, as they say in Florence’. Just a fortnight later, Lee complained to Mrs Jenkin that she was already sick of her job as a critic as, even though she had read only four of Ouida’s ‘terrible romances’ so far, the thought of reading seven more ‘annihilated’ her.1 Despite Lee’s youthful disdain for both the fiction and personal life of her fellow Florentine, it is significant that nine years later the publication of her own roman à clef about the Aesthetic Movement in London, Miss Brown (1884) led Lee’s friend and critic W.C. Monkhouse to admonish her privately for writing a ‘very nasty’ novel about ‘beastly’ people and ask whether her intention had been to ‘rival Ouida’ (Gunn, p. 102). Monkhouse’s anxieties about the damage that Lee’s foray into popular fiction would apparently cause its author’s growing reputation as a cultural historian indicate that for him, at any rate, Ouida’s novels seemed to have exercised an unwholesome influence over the writing of what would prove to be a controversial, albeit commercially successful, first novel.