Tan calf spines with red and title plate and raised banding, gilt decoration and lettering. Red embossed pattern boards.

F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feel and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

A First New Edition

Ouida concluded her military novels like Under Two Flags with Tricotrin. (1869), in which her Bonapartist hero sacrificed his life for democracy’s sake — a risky theme in the years before the Paris Commune in 1871. However, the book represented less of a problem than her other work that year, Puck: His Vicissitudes, Adventures, Observations, Conclusions, Friendships, and Philosophies in which a Maltese terrier narrated his life story. In this, Ouida’s first roman à clef, the bohemian replaced the military, and the romantic ceded to the epigrammatic.

As usual, she relied on her social life to develop themes, settings, and characters, but times had changed. Puck, who was variously sold, stolen, and lost, lived the bulk of his life in the demi-monde of journalism and the theatre where he observed that pretty women got everything they wanted. Ouida had her alter ego express deep cynicism about the establishment and its hangers-on, men’s relationships with women (especially courtesans). Her particular target was an Englishwoman, Cora Pearl (in the novel transformed into “Laura Pearl”), a courtesan in Paris kept in great style by the half-brother of Napoléon III. She famously entertained the Prince of Wales and his Jockey Club friends at dinner in 1867 by serving herself as a delectable on a silver platter.

The following passage provides a sample of Ouida’s political criticism in Puck: “The good people are afraid of “mob-rule” in Europe just now,—the fools!—the very dregs of the mob rule already; the Mob Feminine raised on high from the gutter, with its hands clutching gold, and its lips breathing poison, and its vices mimicked in palaces and its lusts murdering the brains, and the souls, and the bodies of men!” (117), Ouida was angry, very angry, and Puck’s voice revealed her several disappointments — first with the Bonapartes, then with a specific man by whom she felt betrayed, and finally the double standard of her times. In writing about this demi-monde Ouida mixed vitriol with poetic analogies as when she reports that during the country parties for the indolent demi-monde, it was easy “to brush a kiss from a cheek so coolly, and with as little pardon asked, as when brushing the bloom off a peach” (258).

Reviewers, who ignoring her jibes at the police, the church, and (less directly) the Prince of Wales, attacked the book as unwholesome nonsense unsuitable for wives or daughters. Luckily, because the reading public did not know Ouida’s identity, her revelations were not a catastrophe. At least not yet.

Just over a year after Puck’s publication, Ouida surveyed her life, which lay in as much ruin as Paris after the battles of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune that followed it (which took at least one of her real-life heroes, Colonel Pemberton, and, she and her mother thought, Louis Ramé). Identifying as more French than British, she sympathized with revolutionaries at a time when hostility to such a position might alienate critics and readers. When the editor of the popular periodical Once a Week revealed that Ouida was a Miss de Ramé, he cut her adrift from the people on whom she depended for both friendship and material. Being ostracised by bohemians would be isolation indeed for someone who did not conform.

Ouida (1 January 1839 – 25 January 1908) was the pseudonym of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé (although she preferred to be known as Marie Louise de la Ramée). During her career, Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, as well as short stories, children’s books and essays. Moderately successful, she lived a life of luxury, entertaining many of the literary figures of the day. Under Two Flags, one of her most famous novels, described the British in Algeria. It expressed sympathy for the French colonists—with whom Ouida deeply identified—and, to some extent, the Arabs. The novel was adapted for the stage, and was filmed six times. Her novel A Dog of Flanders is considered a children’s classic in much of Asia.  The American author Jack London cited her novel Signa as one of the reasons for his literary success. Her lavish lifestyle eventually led her to penury, and her works were put up for auction to pay her debts. She died in Italy from pneumonia. Soon after her death, her friends organized a public subscription in Bury St Edmunds, where they had a fountain for horses and dogs installed in her name.