Ferdi McDermott
October 2026
It is good news that Olive Custance now leads a chapter in a Palgrave monograph. Patricia Murphy’s Poetry of the New Woman: Public Concerns, Private Matters (2023) opens its third chapter, “The Workings of Desire,” with her, calls her poetry “the compelling focus” of the chapter, and treats her as a poet of real consequence rather than as an appendage to Lord Alfred Douglas.1 (Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, Dollie Radford, Mary Gillington and Michael Field follow her.) That deserves saying first. What follows is a set of cautions, offered in the spirit of a reader who has spent a good deal of time with the same poems and the same documents.
What Murphy argues
Murphy’s thesis is that Custance’s poetry presents desire as a continuum rather than a fixed orientation. Speakers and beloveds shift between male and female, the poems resist being pinned down, and the reader is left in a deliberate indeterminacy. She reads “Antinous,” “The White Statue,” “A Madrigal,” “The White Witch,” “Autumn Night,” “A Sleep Song,” “Love’s Firstfruits,” “Glamour of Gold” and “A Pause” on these terms, and she uses Custance’s biography as a gloss: the friendship with Natalie Barney, the marriage to Douglas, and the “page” persona that Joseph Bristow has written about so well. She places the whole in a tradition of “decadent aestheticism.” Her attention to the twilight and dawn imagery, and to the poems’ debt to Swinburne, Pater and Wilde, is perceptive, and her attention to metre and rhyme is welcome in a field that too often skips it.
Caution one: a reading that is hard to lose
My first worry is methodological. Again and again the chapter shows that a poem could be spoken by a woman to a woman, a man to a woman, a man to a man, or a woman speaking as a boy. Murphy is open about this. She grades her readings (“A Madrigal” and “Glamour of Gold” lean towards a woman–woman reading; “A Pause” “leans toward” one), she allows that a woman might adopt a male speaker “to conform to and participate in the masculine tradition of love poetry, not simply to conceal passion for another woman,” and she concludes that “no interpretation can be solidified.”2 That candour is to her credit. But it creates a difficulty. When every reading remains open, and a heterosexual, a female–female and a male–male reading are each allowed to stand, the claim that desire in these poems is fluid is very hard to test, and I am not sure it tells us much about these particular poems rather than about love lyrics with ungendered speakers in general.
Nor is the “Cavalier courtier-poet” gloss, which Murphy takes from Stetz and Lasner, neutral. They read the persona as a conventional form for expressing socially unacceptable desire for a woman. That is an argument from biography as much as from the text, and it is one that would be good to see tested against other women poets who used the same convention.
Caution two: the men in the poems
The second is a matter of balance. Murphy’s Custance is read almost entirely through ambiguity, yet a good many of Olive’s poems are addressed, without any ambiguity at all, to men. Rainbows is dedicated “To the Fairy Prince,” her private name for Bosie, and its “Songs of a Fairy Princess” are addressed to him; the Blue Bird is dedicated “To My Husband”; and more poems to him follow in The Inn of Dreams.3 The chapter does not ignore the marriage, but it treats it chiefly as one pole of a continuum.
The Prince, however, was not Bosie’s invention. The poet John Gray, who does not appear in the chapter (the index lists no John Gray), was, so far as the documents show, the first of her Princes. In 1892 she copied for him a poem called “Prince of Dreams,” with the note, “I used to call you ‘Prince of Dreams’ so you may like this poem!”4 A poem Sewell prints as “To John Gray,” and which she published in a different form in Opals as “Ideal,” leaves no doubt about the grammar. Its “Poet that clamoured unto God in song” has “profound eyes,” “heavy hair” and a voice “deep and low with tenderness.”5 I wrote about this episode, and about how much of it I had first got wrong, in an earlier post. I would not claim that Gray is the missing key to her desire. But a reading that finds the poems so open to a woman beloved should also reckon with how many of them are plainly written to a man, and with the fact that the first of them was addressed to a poet she heard as singing to God.
Caution three: dots and dashes
Third, the ellipses. Murphy reads the abundant dots in “A Pause” as marks of concealment: desire that must stay unspoken, even to its object.6 In another poem she reads a closing ellipsis as presaging consummation.7 But her own note reports (following Michelle Whitney) that the Times Literary Supplement reviewer in 1902 simply thought Olive overused them, and that her “letters and diaries” are “saturated with dashes and dots.”8 A private diary does not need to conceal anything from itself. Anyone who has read the extracts in Sewell’s Olive Custance: Her Life and Work knows the habit. It is a feature of her prose as well as her verse, and so it is thin evidence for concealment in any one poem. If the same mark can mean consummation here and concealment there, it is also not carrying much interpretive weight.
Caution four: the biography as proof
Fourth, Murphy states that Olive was bisexual as a settled fact (“Custance was herself bisexual”) and then reads the poems back through it, noting that the interpretations “gain credence” in the light of it.9 The evidence for an intense relationship with Natalie Barney is real, and no one should wish it away. And Murphy does not use the label carelessly: she backs it with Douglas’s own remark that “almost everyone is more or less bi-sexual.” But the move from life to poem and back to life is circular, and the evidence on the biographical side is thinner than the confidence suggests. I would rather let the documents say what they say, and let the poems stand on their own evidence.
What is missing
The chapter is almost silent on what I take to be the other dimension of Olive’s imagination: the religious and spiritual one. It does notice the hymn-like devotion of “The White Statue,” though it reads that as erotic address. This is not a pious afterthought. She was a girl who signed herself “Wild Olive” in The Lady’s Pictorial at fourteen, long before she met anyone in the circles Murphy describes; who wrote to a friend about Gray’s carols of the Christ Child; and who moved in the world of Gray, Lionel Johnson and Pater that I have been calling spiritualised aestheticism. Murphy does come back to Custance in chapter six, where she reads “The Snow” and “The Song Spinner” through Pater and quotes Olive’s memoir of praying before a statue of Apollo “to the Divine idea of beauty.”10 That is a welcome acknowledgement, but there the spiritual vocabulary serves an aesthetic argument. As far as I can see, the “Wild Olive” persona is not discussed anywhere in the book, though “Opal” is, as a sign of changeability. Both names are plays on her own, and both are choices of self-presentation. It would be worth asking what the earlier, stranger one tells us.
A small point: one of Murphy’s notes dates Opals to 1891, though her text gives the correct date of 1897.11 It is a slip, not a flaw in the argument.
In sum
I would recommend the chapter to anyone beginning on Custance, as a sophisticated and attentive reading of her formal craft. I would simply read it with Sewell, Bristow and Pulham beside it, and with the primary texts, including the poem to John Gray, open on the desk. Olive Custance is a better poet and a more various person than any single lens, mine included, can show.
References
- Patricia Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman: Public Concerns, Private Matters (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), ch. 3, “The Workings of Desire,” pp. 71–107; Custance is the focus of pp. 71–93.
- Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, pp. 77–78 (“A Madrigal,” with Stetz and Lasner, n. 22: Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, England in the 1890s, p. 27) and p. 93. The remark on women adopting a male speaker is in the discussion of “A Madrigal,” with Gillington as the example.
- Olive Custance, Rainbows (London: John Lane, 1902), dedication and “Songs of a Fairy Princess”; The Blue Bird (1905), dedication; The Inn of Dreams (1911).
- Olive Custance, “Prince of Dreams” (1892), in the John Gray manuscript group, Berg Collection, New York Public Library (examined and noted by the author, 2018); a note of the same kind is quoted in Julian Symons, “The Prince of Breams,” Times Literary Supplement, 31 May 1963, p. 387.
- Brocard Sewell, In the Dorian Mode: A Life of John Gray, 1866–1934 (Padstow: Tabb House, 1983), p. 56. “Ideal” was printed in Opals (London: John Lane, 1897).
- Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, pp. 90–93.
- Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, p. 86 (the closing ellipsis; see n. 30, p. 107).
- Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, p. 107, n. 30, quoting Michelle L. Whitney, “Olive Custance,” in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets, ed. William B. Thesing (Detroit: Gale, 2001), p. 48.
- Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, pp. 71–72 and p. 86 (Douglas, Autobiography, quoted in n. 29).
- Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, ch. 6, “Poets on Poetry,” pp. 204–206.
- Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, p. 72 (text, correctly 1897) and p. 106, n. 16 (“1891”).
