Ouida English
Ouida
1839~1908. A British female writer. Her real name is Maria Louise Ramé. Her father was French and her mother Greek. She is well-known to Japanese as a writer of A Dog of Flanders(1872), though she is almost forgotten in England. In many of her works, dogs play important roles: Ouida loved dogs very much. One of her representative works Puck(1870), the protagonist Puck, a dog, sees human world critically. She and Vernon Lee have a lot in common: for example both of them oppose vivisection. She wrote many books to criticize cruelty to animals. In Toxin, a novel, she attacked vivisection.
Ouida highly valued Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown. She wrote: "It both amused and interested me....The book gives me the impression of having been written at a galop (sic); but this is better than weeding and pruning till all flavour is gone."
Ouida was a very proud woman and difficult to get along with. She was sometimes economically in trouble and Lee tried to help her, but Ouida rejected her aid. ("Vernon Lee, for instance, saw the published accounts of Ouida's distress." Elizabeth Lee, Ouida: A Memoir, P.222.)
Both Lee and Ouida loved Italy. Elizabeth Lee, a biographer of Ouida, writes: "Vernon Lee, who knows Italy even better than Ouida knew it, has paid high tribute to Ouida's descriptions of Italy."(P.270.) "Vernon Lee also finds that Ouida's Italian novels have influenced those of Mrs. Wharton." (P. 271.)
Lee’s short story 'Lady Tal' is based on the relationship between Vernon Lee and Henry James. The heroine, Lady Tal, (mouthpiece of Vernon Lee) says to Jervase Marion （novelist modelled after Henry James） as follows: "There wasn't a reason for making me believe that I was going to be George Eliot and Ouida rolled into one, with the best qualities of Goethe and Dean Swift into the bargain."
In the preface to 'Winthrop's Adventure' in For Maurice, Lee wrote on Italy described by Ouida: "The Italy of Ouida and J.A. Symonds (let alone of Childe Harold), made solely for the heart's desire of the imaginative tourist; and therefore awakening the genuine feelings of which it was born."
Ouida was also an aesthete and Lee points out that Ouida gave some influence on Oscar Wilde. Eleanor Fitzsimons states that Ouida as an aesthete gave influences on Lee. （Eleanor Fitzsimons, Wilde's Women, 196.）
