Lady on a Plush Pegasus

THE FINE AND THE WICKED (223 pp.)--Monica Stirling--Coward-McCann ($4).

Stuffed birds under glass bells no longer sit on modern mantelpieces, and the 47 books of Ouida no longer stand between ebony bookends. Yet Ouida, "almost the last of lady authors," is not just a Victorian-Edwardian period piece. Monica

Stirling's detailed, if often careless book proves her a writer of astonishing vigor, and as rare a bird as any to undergo a biographer's taxidermy.

Before the turn of the century, she enjoyed a wicked fame, and children were spanked for reading her; in an age that would call a bed a bed only if it was a deathbed, Ouida called it a great bouncing ottoman. Her novels (most famed: Under Two Flags) were admired by writers as sophisticated as Max Beerbohm and G. K. Chesterton, who wrote: "Though it is impossible not to smile at Ouida, it is equally impossible not to read her."

The trouble for any reader who tackles her today is that Ouida usually wrote with a perfume atomizer about aristocratic characters now very nearly extinct. None loved a lord more dearly than Ouida, and, mounted on the plush Pegasus of her imagination, she wrote to hounds with the best of them. She was a hopeless romantic--but she had the sense to know it. "I do not object to realism in fiction," she wrote, "but the passion flower is as real as the potato."

Scented Boudoirs. Amid the frostbitten tubers of modern fiction, no one, but no one, digs Ouida's passion flowers. Her heroes and heroines had names like Fulke Ravensworth, Marion Lady Vavasour and Vaux or Sir Fulke Erceldorme. Elinor Glyn and her tiger skin were nothing to Ouida's scented boudoirs. Yet, in an age before Cinerama, she was a great descriptive writer, able to evoke Venice, Vienna, Chamonix without ever having paid them so much as a courtesy call.

She was born Louise (hence, from a childish lisp. Ouida) Rame, in Bury St. Edmunds. Her father, a mysterious Frenchman, may or may not have been a spy for Louis Napoleon. As she grew up, she displayed a tough mind and an absurd imagination--something between Racine and Edward Lear, says Biographer Stirling. When she insisted on behaving like her own fictional characters (e.g., flinging an ivory cigar case from her opera box at the feet of an Italian tenor), it became clear that England was not for her nor she for England.

She spent 23 years in Florence, and wrote against debt like Dostoevsky. She had a desperate, long and painful affair with a romantic Italian who claimed to be the inventor of the first gasoline engine. She seems to have committed the one fatal mistake a woman can make with a man--she made him feel a fool. Came the day when her lover cut her dead in public.

Still she wrote, and lavishly entertained unprejudiced friends from the great world, including past and future Viceroys of India, Lords Lytton (Novelist Bulwer-Lytton's son) and Curzon. Troubles piled up. When she offended the Italians with a bitterly realistic story, her pony cart was shot at. She was furious: the noise might have made her ponies nervous. The Italians imposed a muzzling order against all dogs; she spent a night with her beloved pooches in a hackney carriage rather than see their freedom being curtailed.

The Fatal Flaw. Finally, says Biographer Stirling, Ouida's life became "grotesque, pantomime-like and tragic." During her return visit to England, intended to be triumphal, handsome but aging (55) Lord Lytton locked himself in his room to escape her attentions. Ouida wound up her life as a spinster with a passion for pet dogs, owls and other dumb chums: but she lived it down to the end with courage.

The fatal flaw in the logic of Ouida's life was that a Philistine aristocracy did not accept those who celebrated it. The toffs came to her parties but seldom asked her back. She was, says her biographer, "the last representative of a class to which she did not belong." When she died in 1908, aged 69, only a few writers and aristocratic nonconformists were faithful. She did not worry about posterity. She wrote: "Possibly there will be no posterity at all, but only a shattered earth; scattered into space by some exploit of that boastful learning called science."

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