“ROMANS FRANÇAIS ÉCRITS EN ANGLAIS”: OUIDA, THE SENSATION NOVEL AND FIN-DE-SIÈCLE LITERARY CENSORSHIP

Abstract

Of all the female sensation novelists, Ouida was considered the most morally dangerous to young readers. Despite her critical reputation, Ouida's work was stocked by the leading circulating libraries. It has been suggested that she was tolerated, in part, because she wrote sensational romances rather than definitive sensation novels, and that she was perceived to write “French novels […] in English”. This essay extends our understanding of the affinities between English sensation fiction and French realist or naturalist fiction. Ouida's cultivated French identity was a signal of her rejection of Anglo-Saxon codes of sexual morality. Her polemical campaign against literary censorship consistently places French and English realist fiction in opposition—the one written for men and women, the other for young girls. Ouida's contribution to the late nineteenth-century debate about literary censorship is positioned within the context of shifting attitudes to sexual morality. Theatrical adaptations of Ouida's novels were censored by the Lord Chamberlain's Office, and many of the free libraries banned her altogether—although such action was generally reported unsympathetically in the press. Indeed, at this very period, new work by Ouida was made available to a wide readership through newspaper syndicates, such as Tillotson's, which circulated her fiction and essays in provincial newspapers.