Word: ouida
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Stuffed birds under glass bells no longer sit on modern mantelpieces, and the 47 books of Ouida no longer stand between ebony bookends. Yet Ouida, "almost the last of lady authors," is not just a Victorian-Edwardian period piece. Monica
Before the turn of the century, she enjoyed a wicked fame, and children were spanked for reading her; in an age that would call a bed a bed only if it was a deathbed, Ouida called it a great bouncing ottoman. Her novels (most famed: Under Two Flags) were admired by writers as sophisticated as Max Beerbohm and G. K. Chesterton, who wrote: "Though it is impossible not to smile at Ouida, it is equally impossible not to read...
...trouble for any reader who tackles her today is that Ouida usually wrote with a perfume atomizer about aristocratic characters now very nearly extinct. None loved a lord more dearly than Ouida, and, mounted on the plush Pegasus of her imagination, she wrote to hounds with the best of them. She was a hopeless romantic-but she had the sense to know it. "I do not object to realism in fiction," she wrote, "but the passion flower is as real as the potato...
Scented Boudoirs. Amid the frostbitten tubers of modern fiction, no one, but no one, digs Ouida's passion flowers. Her heroes and heroines had names like Fulke Ravensworth, Marion Lady Vavasour and Vaux or Sir Fulke Erceldorme. Elinor Glyn and her tiger skin were nothing to Ouida's scented boudoirs. Yet, in an age before Cinerama, she was a great descriptive writer, able to evoke Venice, Vienna, Chamonix without ever having paid them so much as a courtesy call...
Sherlock Holmes brought Basil Rathbone to Broadway in a role he has played countless times in movies and on radio. The play was not William Gillette's famous old warhorse. but a new and curious one by Ouida (Mrs. Basil) Rathbone. However it might strike Baker Street Irregulars, for Baker Street occasionals it had none of the thrills of detective drama, only the feeblest period charm, and mere hints of Holmes's personal glamour. A dull clutter of styles and stories, it closed after three performances...