Ouida - Literary Career

Literary Career

During her career, Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, children's books and collections of short stories and essays. She was an animal lover and rescuer, and at times owned as many as thirty dogs. Ouida's work had several phases.

Her first novel, Held in Bondage was published in 1863, when she was 24. (She later claimed to have written Idalia, a well-known novel, at the age of 16. It featured a heroine who was a rebel/ingenue sympathetic to Italian independence.

In her early period, her novels were considered "racy" and "swashbuckling", a contrast to "the moralistic prose of early Victorian literature" (Tom Steele), and a hybrid of the sensationalism of the 1860s and the proto-adventure novels being published as part of the romanticisation of imperial expansion. Later her work was more typical of historical romance, though she never stopped comment on contemporary society. She also wrote several stories for children.

Under Two Flags, one of her most well-known novels, described the British in Algeria. It expressed sympathy for the French colonists (called pieds noir)—with whom Ouida deeply identified—and, to some extent, the Arabs. This book was adapted as dramatic plays, and was adapted four times as a film. The American author Jack London cited her novel Signa, which he read at age eight, as one of the eight reasons for his literary success.