Richard Le Gallienne and the Golden Girl: Olive Custance’s Early Celebrity

In the mid-1890s Olive Custance was already a poet of wide circulation and deep fascination. Verses such as The Parting Hour and other lyrics printed in The Pall Mall Magazine and companion weeklies were quickly reprinted in dozens of newspapers across the United States and the Empire. Before she reached twenty, her poems had been read by tens of thousands of people—an extraordinary reach for a young writer who had never published a book. The Pall Mall reproductions gave her what the London aesthetes rarely achieved: a popular readership that preceded her literary consecration.

By the time her first collection, Opals (1897), appeared from John Lane’s Bodley Head, Custance had achieved the rare distinction of arriving in print already known. To the general public she was the “new poetess” whose delicate songs had floated through the press; to the coterie around The Yellow Book she was a discovery waiting to be claimed. The publication of a volume was therefore both confirmation and transformation—a shift from precocious popularity to accepted artistry.

A newly discovered letter now transforms that chronology. Written by Lord Alfred Douglas from 16 Draycott Place, London SW, on 27 November 1925, it records what Olive herself told him about the origins of Opals:

“My wife says that all the poems in Opals, or practically all, were written before she was 17 and were given by Le Gallienne to Lane, who wanted to publish them. But her parents would not allow this publication at the time and they were not published until 1897.”

This statement pushes Le Gallienne’s patronage back to about 1890 or 1891, when Olive was still in her mid-teens—six or seven years earlier than any previous record. He thus emerges as her earliest professional advocate, championing her work before Harland or Symons had even heard of her. It also explains the fervour of his 1897 review: he was praising a poet whose gift he had recognised since her girlhood. Le Gallienne was not simply the reviewer of Opals; he was its midwife.

His interest was never purely professional. Lonely at the time and open about his search for a feminine ideal, he admired Olive’s youth and “boyish” vivacity as much as her verse, and his language about her work glows with rapture as well as judgement. His review of Opals, printed in The Westminster Budget on 20 August 1897 under the title “A New Woman Poet,” reads almost like a prose lyric. He began with a mixture of irony and adoration:

“Our men are tired of pricking the same bloom, and we welcome humbly the appearance of this new flower. Miss Olive Custance’s little volume of Opals contains the finest poetry written by so young a singer for a long time. Two years ago, we were bemoaning the fact that women’s verse had lost its true feminine quality—its sense of spiritual and delicate emotion. Miss Custance brings it back again.”^[2]

He praised her originality, “the charm of fragility,” and her instinct for what he called “the eternal feminine note that refines rather than asserts.” Le Gallienne singled out poems such as A Frame and A Song for their “melancholy delight in beauty that already fades as it is sung.” He compared her delicacy to Christina Rossetti’s but found in her an even lighter touch, “the grace of a child who dreams before she has been awakened by the world.”

“Miss Custance stands where poetry itself stands to-day—between innocence and art, between dawn and the afterglow. There is not a line that is not feminine in the best sense of the word, and few that are not beautiful.”

The Westminster Budget piece was more than criticism—it was a valentine in prose. Coming from a poet of Le Gallienne’s renown, it proclaimed her as the long-awaited “new woman poet” of the fin de siècle. In tone and reach it introduced Olive Custance not only to the London press but to an Anglo-American audience already familiar with her magazine verse.

A few years later, when Olive’s marriage to Lord Alfred Douglas was announced, American newspapers were still retailing fragments of the legend. A syndicated notice published in March 1902 repeated the gossip that she “has always affected Bohemia and at one time formed a wild attachment for Richard Le Gallienne.”^[3] The rumour turned a literary friendship into romantic folklore. It suggests how powerfully the fin-de-siècle imagination had already fixed upon her—the elfin poet of Opals, half-real, half-mythic, who moved through that brief golden season of the 1890s like one of her own dream-figures.

Le Gallienne also immortalised her in fiction. In The Quest of the Golden Girl (1897), a semi-autobiographical novel, Olive appears transfigured as “Nicolette,” the ethereal young woman whose boyish grace and literary passion enchant the narrator. Nicolette’s father, the Major-General, is a clear echo of Colonel Custance, while the heroine’s combination of innocence, intelligence, and mischief evokes Olive with unmistakable tenderness. The passages describing her woodland library, her laughter, and her mixture of purity and curiosity amount to a contemporary portrait—lightly veiled but immediately recognisable to readers in her circle.

“My young lady’s private purse had added all that was most sugared and musical and generally delusive in the vellum-bound literature of our own luxurious day. Never was such a nest of singing birds. All day long, to the ear of the spirit, there was in this little library a sound of harping and singing and the telling of tales—songs and tales of a world that never was, yet shall ever be.”^[4]

“Nicolette and I soon found that we had all these and many another writer in common, and before our lunch was ended we were nearer to each other than many old friends. We were such excellent chums. We got along together as if indeed we had been two brothers, equable in our tempers and one in our desires.”^[5]

Even in its irony, the novel captures something of the magnetism Olive inspired among the aesthetes—that blend of spiritual idealism and sensuous charm which made her both elusive and unforgettable. Her beauty and vivacity, her talent for friendship and conversation, and her romantic imagination all contributed to the aura that surrounded her in the 1890s.

The same year, a light-hearted spoof titled The Quest of the Gilt-Edged Girl was issued by John Lane under the pseudonym “Richard de Lyrienne,” the invention of David Betham Hodge and George Matheson. The parody mocked Le Gallienne’s sentimentality and the Bodley Head circle, portraying a world of self-conscious artifice and gentle absurdity. Olive is mentioned only once, and rather kindly, in a passage teasing her enthusiasm for “pretty fireworks.” Yet the fact that her name appeared at all in a satire of the 1890s confirms how famous she had already become within that close world of London letters.

Together, the review, the rumour, and the twin romans à clef trace the making of a myth. Before she was twenty-five Olive Custance had become both muse and legend: admired by poets, fictionalised by one, parodied by another, and—through Le Gallienne’s championship—welcomed into print by the most fashionable publisher of the age. Her early celebrity was therefore doubly remarkable. She had begun as a newspaper poet read by thousands; she ended the decade as the “Golden Girl” of the English aesthetic movement, poised between innocence and art, dawn and afterglow.

This new evidence reconfigures the story told by earlier biographers and critics. Karl Beckson and Brocard Sewell recognised Le Gallienne’s enthusiasm for Opals but did not identify his decisive part in its publication. Caspar Wintermans and Sarah Parker, writing later, both repeat the assumption that Olive’s career was launched within Harland’s or Dowson’s patronage. The UBC letter and Le Gallienne’s extraordinarily fulsome review of Opals on publication make it clear that it was his intervention and influence that carried Opals to the Bodley Head and his widely reprinted review that established her public reputation. Taken together with the American rumours of 1902 and the twin romans à clef, these materials restore Olive Custance’s early celebrity to its proper scale: she was not a marginal disciple of the decadents but one of the few women writers of the 1890s,  perhaps the only one, to achieve popular and literary recognition simultaneously.

Notes

1. Letter from Lord Alfred Douglas to Arthur Symons, 16 Draycott Place, London SW, 27 November 1925, Colbeck Collection, University of British Columbia.
2. Richard Le Gallienne, “A New Woman Poet,” The Westminster Budget, 20 August 1897, p. 12.
3. “Olive Custance’s Alliance,” syndicated press report, New York World (8 March 1902), reprinted widely in American newspapers.
4. Richard Le Gallienne, The Quest of the Golden Girl (London: John Lane, 1897), p. 53.
5. Ibid., p. 68.
6. Richard de Lyrienne [David Betham Hodge and George Matheson], The Quest of the Gilt-Edged Girl (London: John Lane, 1897), p. 87.

© 2025 Ferdi McDermott. Permission is granted for reasonable quotation with acknowledgement.

Previously unpublished correspondence of Lord Alfred Douglas is reproduced by courtesy of the Executors of the Literary Estate of Lord Alfred Douglas © 2025, John Rubinstein and John Stratford.