ABSTRACT

By 1870 Ouida was an established sensation novelist with readers in Britain, Europe, and America. Her outsider status in British society—and vulnerability to scandal—lay in differences beyond her control: class, gender, spinsterhood, and French paternity. She grew up in a rural backwater, before, at the age of 18 in 1857, she, her mother, and grandmother, moved to London. She successfully marketed serialized romances featuring military heroes. When she published through the Tinsley Brothers (whose offices were near the illicit charms of Covent Garden chorus girls), she entered a bohemian world in which aristocrats, literati, artists, and members of the press mingled. Eventually aware of and horrified by the nexus of prostitution, the theater, and Parisian courtesans, Ouida published her scandalous roman à clef, Puck. Seemingly lulled into a false sense of security by debates about the Contagious Diseases Act, she cast extroverted British sex worker Cora Pearl—who lived off aristocrats’ fortunes in Paris—as “Laura Pearl,” outed theater managers exploiting and journalists leering at the legs of ballet girls, and all the while empathized with their aristocratic and military clients. Ineffectively distancing herself from her narrative by using decipherable inversions, thinly disguised names, and, critically, a Maltese terrier (Puck) as an ill-done-by alter ego, she took huge risks that lost her friends and favorable publicity.