Ferdi McDermott
25 October 2025
The brief encounter between Olive Custance and John Gray occupies a small but revealing place in the history of the 1890s. It shows not only the emotional openness of the young poetess but also the religious and aesthetic vocabulary she drew from her cultural milieu. Brocard Sewell’s In the Dorian Mode: A Life of John Gray, 1866–1934 (Padstow: Tabb House, 1983) remains the principal source for the episode, preserving the text of Olive’s diary and correspondence.
Sewell recounts that Olive, “a young society girl of aristocratic family,” met Gray “at a party” when she was about sixteen (c. 1890–91) and “fell in love with him at once.”1 “She must have been an extremely beautiful girl,” he adds, “and if only he had been attracted to her, her future life might have been happier.” Gray, about eight years her senior, was courteous but unresponsive; nevertheless, he became for her “my ideal Poet.”
Her diary entries for 4 and 8 January 1896, quoted by Sewell, describe her joy in hearing from Gray and receiving Silverpoints:2
“I had sent John Gray some of my poems, and the New Year brought a beautiful letter from him—and the photograph I so much desired and a book, Miracle Plays by K. Tynan Hinkson …”
“Then again next morning he came and brought me Silverpoints and was so kind and talked so beautifully—and looked so nice. He is my ideal Poet … and we were, I think, a happy little trio … But at last we all had to say goodbye—and he went home and sent me at once a lovely book and a charming little note.”
Two years earlier, at Christmas 1894, Olive had written from Weston, Norfolk, to a friend she calls “Lulu,” enclosing one of Gray’s privately printed Blue Calendars, little devotional booklets of verse. Her letter, quoted in full by Sewell, reveals both literary admiration and spiritual longing:3
“Lulu, I send you a book and a song. For Christmas … A Poet—whom I once met as a child (I was about sixteen, and he was twenty-five)—wrote to me the other day and sent me his book—privately printed—of Carols on the life of the Christ Child. I think I may have spoken to you about him as he has been for a long while my Prince of Poets. There is not one who can sing like him—his poems are so precious and so pure … He has lived a strange full life and now he writes:
‘At a certain time one is apt to want to live for grace. Soon the better ideal comes—to live well and chance the grace. And is it not so with poetry? Have you come to the determination to write well at every risk—to put more fire into your work than anyone else could ever find out?’
Ever your loving WILD OLIVE.”
Sewell described this as “the earliest use of the name Wild Olive,” observing that it expressed “both her youthful piety and her continuing fascination with the man she still called ‘my Prince of Poets.’”4 Later evidence, however, shows that Olive had adopted the name six years earlier, in 1888, when she was only fourteen. Several brief verses and letters signed “Wild Olive” appeared that year in The Lady’s Pictorial (London), showing that she had already fashioned a poetic persona from the phrase before ever meeting Gray.5 The 1894 letter thus represents not the creation but the revival of a name she had used since girlhood.
Ruskin and “Wild Olive”
There is an intriguing possible literary context for Olive’s choice of name in the writings of John Ruskin. His celebrated volume The Crown of Wild Olive, first published in 1866, would have made the phrase familiar to many Victorian readers. In the book’s introductory pages Ruskin explains the classical image from which his title is taken: the wreath of wild olive awarded to the victor in the ancient Olympic games.
For Ruskin, the humble wreath becomes an emblem not of worldly splendour but of honour, peace and rest. The victor receives only “some few leaves of wild olive, cool to the tired brow,” and Ruskin describes the plant itself as a tree growing almost carelessly among the rocks, with little show of blossom or fruit. Yet precisely this modest wreath becomes for him a “type of grey honour, and sweet rest.”
Ruskin returned to the symbolism of the olive in The Queen of the Air (1869), where he associated it with Athena and Hercules. There he recalls the tradition that Hercules planted the wild olive at Olympia, from which came the Olympic crown of honour and rest. The olive also carries wider associations for Ruskin—with sacred anointing, strength, light, wisdom and peace.
This makes Ruskin a suggestive context for Olive Custance’s early use of “Wild Olive,” but it is important not to claim more than the evidence presently allows. We do not yet know that the fourteen-year-old Olive consciously took her pseudonym from Ruskin. The most immediate attraction of the name may simply have been the play upon her own Christian name: she was Olive, and the youthful poet presenting herself to the world was “Wild Olive.” Ruskin’s well-known title nevertheless means that the phrase already possessed a rich literary resonance in late-Victorian England.
If Ruskin was indeed somewhere in the background of her choice, the association is particularly apt. His wild olive is not primarily an emblem of an “untamed human will” awaiting religious cultivation, as has sometimes been suggested. Rather, it belongs to a classical complex of images involving the Olympic crown, Athena, honour, endurance and peace. Whether Olive consciously intended these associations remains an open question, but they form part of the cultural world in which her pseudonym would have been read.
Poems from the Episode
Several poems survive from this period of devotion. One is “Prince of Dreams,” which Olive copied in 1892 into a manuscript group of poems now in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. It begins “Oh God, let all my dreams come true …,” and its second stanza opens “O Prince of Dreams, I love you so …”. Her covering note reads: “I used to call you ‘Prince of Dreams’ so you may like this poem! A dream poem!” A note of the same kind is quoted in the Times Literary Supplement, where the reviewer adds that Gray, in a playful mood, changed the title to “The Prince of Breams.”6
Sewell prints two others. The first, “Reminiscences,” was printed in Rainbows (London: John Lane, 1902); Sewell notes that Olive had originally written it under the title “To John Gray.” It looks back upon the long-past meeting: “Just once we met, / It seems so long ago …”.7 The second, which Sewell prints under the heading “To John Gray,” shares its first eight lines with “Ideal,” a poem in her first collection, Opals (1897); the ending, however, differs.8 Sewell’s text runs to ten lines:
To John Gray
We are not sundered for we never met.
We only passed each other in the throng;
We moved together, but not long … not long …
You were indifferent … and I may forget
Your profound eyes, your heavy hair, your voice
So clear, yet deep and low with tenderness,
That lingered on my ears like a caress
And roused my heart to make a futile choice.
O! Poet that clamoured unto God in song!
How should I lose you thus and lack regret?
The version in Opals closes instead with three lines: “O! Poet that passed me carelessly in the throng— / O! Soul that clamoured unto God in song! / How should I lose you thus and lack regret?” The poem was therefore in print by 1897. The two versions differ only at the close, and which came first is a question for the manuscript.
When, in 1898, Gray resolved to enter the Scots College in Rome to prepare for the priesthood, “among those who understood and approved his decision were Olive Custance and Lady Currie.”9 Thus, even after his retreat from literary society, Olive continued to venerate him. Her signature “Wild Olive” long predated this episode, but in the surviving 1894 letter it sits strikingly beside her admiration for Gray’s movement towards a more explicitly religious understanding of art and life.
References
- Brocard Sewell, In the Dorian Mode: A Life of John Gray, 1866–1934 (Padstow: Tabb House, 1983), p. 56.
- Ibid., p. 57.
- Ibid., p. 61.
- Ibid.
- See The Lady’s Pictorial (London), issues of 1888, where several short poems and letters by Olive Custance appear under the signature “Wild Olive.”
- 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); Julian Symons, “The Prince of Breams,” Times Literary Supplement, no. 3196, 31 May 1963, p. 387, reviewing Two Friends: John Gray and André Raffalovich, ed. Brocard Sewell (Aylesford: Saint Albert’s Press, 1963).
- Olive Custance, “Reminiscences,” Rainbows (London: John Lane, 1902); also printed in Sewell, In the Dorian Mode, p. 56.
- Olive Custance, “Ideal,” Opals (London: John Lane, 1897); Sewell, In the Dorian Mode, p. 56, prints the “To John Gray” text.
- Sewell, In the Dorian Mode, p. 90.
- John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and War (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1866), Introduction.
- John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1869).
