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November 15, 2025 · 4:14 pm

Olive Custance, Lionel Johnson, Walter Pater — and the Circle of Spiritualised Aestheticism

Among the many strands of the 1890s, two quite different versions of “aestheticism” contended for the loyalty of young writers. On the one hand stood the Oxford inheritance of Walter Pater, with its quietism, discipline of attention, and reverent seriousness about beauty. On the other stood the flash and glitter of the London decadents, the brilliant but unstable constellation revolving around Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. These two worlds overlapped, but they were not identical — and for Olive Custance, the difference mattered profoundly.

In several articles on this site, I have already noted that Olive’s early diaries record her passionate admiration for Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, which she described as a revelation. She felt the book expressed “her own soul in prose,” confirming her instinct that art and moral seriousness not only could coexist but were meant to. When Pater died in 1894, she imagined him ascending “to a fairer life,” clothed in “glorious golden robes, tainted with martyr’s blood.” For Olive, Pater was no ordinary critic. He was a kind of priest.

This sacramental view of beauty brings Olive into close alignment with Lionel Johnson, the shy, intense poet who became — after Pater — one of the principal guardians of “spiritual aestheticism.” Johnson’s elegy for Pater, quoted elsewhere on this site, captures the tone perfectly:

“With mind serene, and spirit pure,
And ardent still for truth and right,
He walked his way, aloof, demure,
A scholar and a saint in light.

Hierarch of the spirit, pure and strong,
Worthy Uranian song,
He wrought his appointed will;
And now, at last, is still.”

“O quiet heart, O tender heart,
O deep and secret soul,
A finer part, a fairer part,
Has claimed thee for its goal.”

Here Johnson reaches for Platonic language — Uranian in its 19th-century sense of the “heavenly,” purified eros that draws the soul toward the Beautiful. This is far from the theatricality of the Wildean epigram. Johnson’s “Uranian song” is a devotion. In his vision, Pater becomes a celebrant of an interior liturgy — the high priest of cultural contemplation.

The Lane Circle: A Fellowship of Earnest Souls

It is within this Paterian lineage that we should also place John Gray and Ernest Dowson, both of whom Olive knew and admired — and whose temperaments resonate strongly with her own.

John Gray

John Gray, despite later caricature as Wilde’s “Dorian,” was at heart one of the most serious, ascetic, and spiritually driven writers of the decade. Long before his conversion to Catholicism, Gray’s poems had a delicacy, inwardness, and stillness that drew Olive’s attention. His presence in the aesthetic movement was never flamboyant. He was, even as a young man, a figure of inward discipline and refinement — the closest, in many ways, to a true Paterian disciple.

Gray’s later priesthood, his intense spiritual life, and the severe beauty of poems like “The Well of Narcissus” or “In the Evening of Time,” all speak to the same sensibility Olive cherished: beauty as something solemn, exacting, and morally resonant.

Ernest Dowson

Ernest Dowson, too, belongs in this company — not because his life was serene (it was tragic), but because his ideals were. Dowson’s famous “Cynara” and his quieter lyrics radiate a chastened melancholy and an almost religious sensitivity. His yearning for innocence, purity, and unattainable beauty aligns very closely with Olive’s own emotional palette.

Though plagued by alcohol and heartbreak, Dowson was never a decadent in the Wildean sense. His emotions were too sincere, too unguarded, too bruised. His work possesses none of the ironic sparkle of Oxford wits; it trembles instead with longing. In that sense, Dowson stood much nearer to Pater’s reflective seriousness than to the decorative theatrics of the Wilde–Douglas circle.

Two Aestheticisms: London and Oxford

This distinction is important, because it allows us to draw a defensible line between two cultural constellations:

1. The Wilde–Douglas circle (Oxford + Café Royal)

  • theatrical
  • erotic
  • epigrammatic
  • self-dramatising
  • aestheticism as pose and performance
  • prone to scandal and melodrama
  • full of brilliance, but morally unstable

Even Wilde, whose inner life was far deeper than the caricature, nurtured a younger set who embraced appearance more readily than depth.

2. The Lane/Yellow Book circle (London)

  • reflective
  • melancholy
  • spiritually ambitious
  • committed to beauty as moral seriousness
  • inward, contemplative
  • often tragically fragile, but fundamentally earnest

This circle — Johnson, Gray, Dowson, Harland, Symons, Beardsley — was not chaste, nor angelic, but its ideals inclined toward purity, discipline, and the moral weight of aesthetic experience. They were spiritual aesthetes rather than sensual ones.

Where Olive Custance Belongs

Placed between these two worlds, Olive Custance belongs unmistakably to the Pater–Johnson–Gray–Dowson side.

Her poetry, especially Opals and her later sequences, floats with dreamlike delicacy, but it also bears a chastened, almost devotional intensity. She seeks purity, self-command, visionary beauty. Even her fascination with Bosie can be understood through this lens. She saw in him — or wished to see — not the wayward protagonist of scandal, but the boy-poet of spiritual longing, the imagined vessel of the “Uranian dream.”

A Paterian Aestheticism of the Soul

If Johnson’s poem for Pater is the anthem of spiritualised aestheticism, then Olive’s diaries and poems form its feminine counterpart. Beauty, for her, was not mere diversion. It was an inner calling that demanded discipline, reverence, and surrender.

In an age often caricatured as decadent, Olive Custance stands as a witness to another possibility: a quiet, pure, exacting aestheticism, deeply moral, infused with longing for transcendence — a Paterian aestheticism of the soul.

It is into this lineage — Pater, Johnson, Gray, Dowson — that Olive consciously placed herself.

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October 24, 2025 · 11:43 pm

Olive Custance, John Gray, and the Meaning of “Wild Olive”

Ferdi McDermott

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, ten 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:

“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:

“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 and re-baptism of the name in a devotional key.

The Ruskinian Origin of “Wild Olive”

The term “Wild Olive” itself is drawn from John Ruskin, who used it repeatedly as a moral emblem. In Unto This Last (1860) and again in Ariadne Florentina (1876) and The Queen of the Air (1869), Ruskin contrasts the “wild olive” — the untamed human will — with the cultivated olive of peace and divine order:

“The wild olive is the type of man’s own wild will and intellect; but the tree of peace, the true olive, is planted only by the waters of obedience.”

For readers of the 1880s his phrase had a clear allegorical resonance: nature awaiting cultivation by grace. By adopting Wild Olive as her pen name, Olive Custance combined a literary pun on her Christian name with a Ruskinian emblem of the soul’s conversion from natural vitality to spiritual fruitfulness. In her later reuse of the signature, after meeting Gray, it came to symbolise precisely what she admired in him: the reconciliation of beauty with sanctity, art with faith.

Poems from the Episode

Two poems survive from this period of devotion. The first, “Reminiscences,” printed in Rainbows (London: John Lane, 1902, p. 29), looks back upon the long-past meeting: “Just once we met, / It seems so long ago …”.6

The second, “To John Gray,” was never included in her collections but was printed by Sewell from a manuscript now lost. Written probably between Opals (1897) and Rainbows (1902), it distils the same emotion in a more formal sonnet:

To John Gray
We are not sundered for we never met.
We only passed each other in the throng;
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?

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.”7 Thus, even after his retreat from literary society, Olive continued to venerate him, seeing in his conversion the fulfilment of the ideal she had already expressed through her Ruskinian pseudonym — the wild olive grafted into the true tree of peace.

References

  1. Brocard Sewell, In the Dorian Mode: A Life of John Gray, 1866–1934 (Padstow: Tabb House, 1983), p. 56.
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  2. Ibid., p. 57.
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  3. Ibid., p. 61.
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  4. Ibid.
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  5. See The Lady’s Pictorial (London), issues of 1888, where several short poems and letters by Olive Custance appear under the signature “Wild Olive.”
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  6. Olive Custance, Rainbows (London: John Lane, 1902), p. 29.
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  7. Sewell, In the Dorian Mode, p. 90.
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October 15, 2024 · 2:21 pm

Olive Custance’s Forgotten Childhood: the Making of a Poetess

Ferdi McDermott

When The Parting Hour appeared in May 1895, accompanied by a full-page illustration in The Pall Mall Magazine, it marked Olive Custance’s entry into public life. The poem was reprinted across Britain, the United States, and the colonies, appearing in newspapers from London to Sydney. Within weeks, her name was familiar to readers well beyond literary circles. Yet the sudden attention was the outcome of nearly ten years of steady work, reading, and correspondence.

Olive Eleanor Custance was born in London in 1874, the elder daughter of Colonel Frederick Custance of the 5th Lancers and Eleanor and Eleanor Custance (née Eleanor Constance Jolliffe). The family divided its life between the social world of St John’s Wood and the quiet of Weston, near Attleborough, Norfolk. Weston’s garden and fields gave her the imagery of her early poems: the recurring motifs of spring rain, lilac, and twilight that later appeared in Opals.

Her education was domestic. With her sister Cecil, she was taught by a Scottish governess, Tanie, who provided a balanced grounding in music, French, and moral discipline. Tanie’s calm authority and religious sensibility left a clear trace in Olive’s later poetry.

Encouraged by her mother, Olive began submitting poems to The Lady’s Pictorial in her early teens. Her first published work, Voices of Nature (1888), appeared with a brief editorial note praising her promise. This exchange began a routine of submission, comment, and revision. The editors’ advice was practical—“your writing has improved a little”—but their engagement provided her with a form of apprenticeship. The Lady’s Pictorial and The Gentlewoman offered a space where young women could learn the conventions of print culture, and Olive used it fully. Writing under her pseudonym “Wild Olive,” she gained confidence, learned editorial discipline, and began to see herself as a professional.

By the early 1890s she had travelled to France with family connections, improving her French and attending Mass regularly. Exposure to Catholic ritual and French literature deepened her sense of beauty as something sacred and disciplined rather than purely decorative. In her diary of 1895 she described Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean as a revelation, saying that it expressed her own soul in prose. It confirmed her belief that art and moral seriousness could coexist.

Returning to England, she moved in her mother’s social and artistic circles in Kensington and St John’s Wood. These contacts gave her access to editors and publishers, but she continued to rely on her own initiative and wrote furiously to newspapers seeking publication of her poems, and accepting any helpful advice she got back from Editors. Her father treated her literary interests with tolerant amusement, but her persistence was unmistakable.

Her chance came when The Pall Mall Magazine accepted The Parting Hour in 1895. The poem’s measured sentiment—“The sunset fades, and twilight grows apace, / The hour has come, my love, the parting hour”—and its accompanying illustration by J. Walter West perfectly suited the tastes of late-Victorian readers. Its success was immediate. The artwork featured on the Frontispiece. Remarkable for a girl of her age. Reprints appeared in newspapers across the English-speaking world, often with her name printed in bold. She was to become for a few years, one of the best-known young poets in Britain.

That success was not luck but the result of years of preparation. Through the discipline of the women’s press, she had developed technical skill, a sense of audience, and the confidence to present herself as a writer. Her upbringing, travel, and reading combined to form a distinctive voice: lyrical, restrained, and aware of beauty’s moral weight.

By the time her poem made her famous, Olive Custance was no longer an amateur. The years of practice behind her first success explain why she could step so easily into the literary world that awaited her. What looked like an effortless debut was the work of a decade spent learning her craft in private before her name reached print.

For the first time since he 1880s, we believe, here is Olive’s first ever published poem:

“Voices of Nature” – The Lady’s Pictorial, Saturday, 15 September 1888, p. 19
 By Olive Custance (aged 14)

Ye voices of Nature, how lovely ye are!
Sometimes so soft that when near ye seem far.

There’s the wind that just whispers among the tall trees,
There’s the song of the birds, and the hum of the bees,
And where is there music more lovely than these?

There’s the soft, gentle murmuring of the clear stream,
There’s the voice of the moorhen from ’mong the reeds green,
There’s the splash of the trout as he leaps at the fly,
And the note of the lark as he soars towards the sky.

There’s the low of the herds, and the roar of the sea;
Oh! Nature, your voices are lovely to me.

References

  • The Lady’s Pictorial (issues from 1888–1894), featuring early poems and correspondence, often under the pseudonym “Wild Olive.”
  • The Gentlewoman (early 1890s), containing additional short verses and editorial comments.
  • Custance, Olive. Diary entries, circa 1895 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library).
  • The Pall Mall Magazine, May 1895: publication of The Parting Hour, with illustration by J. Walter West.
  • King, Edwin, (ed.), The Inn of Dreams: Poems by Olive Custance, St. Austin Press, 2015.
  • Adams, Jad. “Olive Custance: A Poet Crossing Boundaries,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, vol. 61, no. 4 (2018), pp. 43–60.
  • Wintermans, Caspar. Alfred Douglas: A Poet’s Life and His Finest Work, 2007.
  • Hawkey, Nancy. Olive Custance Douglas: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Her, 1972.
  • McDermott, Ferdi. “Olive Custance: The Poison Pen of a Fairy Prince,” The Fortnightly Review, 23 April 2020.

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April 23, 2020 · 10:28 pm

Bosie’s poison pen: new poems and research

Abstract

The relationship of Lord and Lady Alfred Douglas was stormy, but not private. An unpublished poem of Douglas’s described it as “Forever in the Press”, and their correspdonence and poetry continues to cast light on their unlikely, enduring union. This article includes significant, unpublished original work of Lord Alfred Douglas and Olive Custance, with the permission of the estate.

 The poison pen of the Fairy Prince. Available at:

https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2020/04/olive-custance/

 

 

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March 14, 2018 · 8:12 pm

One of Olive’s admirers …

Portrait_of_John_Davidson_by_William_Rothenstein

John Davidson. Portrait from “The Yellow Book.”

At sixteen Olive Custance was introduced into the literary society of 1890s London, meeting such men as the publisher John Lane, the writer and critic Richard Le Gallienne,  the future Father John Gray, and many others of the fin de siècle literary scene. One of these was also the now largely forgotten Scottish lyric poet , John Davidson. Davidson visited London, joined the Rhymers’ Club and frequented Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, as literary men still do (eg. www.edmundburke.club)

Davidson was immediately taken by what Le Gallienne called the “flower-like charm” of the young Olive, and he made an eery prophecy about her, predicting both the course of her poetry and the nature of her marriage. It  begins like this:

“At sixteen years, she knew no care:
How could she, sweet and pure as light?
And there pursued her everywhere
Butterflies all white.”

And ends like this:

“There only came to her forlorn
Butterflies all black.”

The poor man walked into the sea in 1909 and was never seen again. May he rest in peace.

Source: Manuscript in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

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December 12, 2017 · 5:54 pm

New biographical work on Custance

Review by Edwin James King

Adams, J. “Olive Custance: A Poet Crossing Boundaries.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 61 no. 1, 2018, pp. 35-65. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/679212.

olive

The British writer, historian and television producer Jad Adams has produced a extensively researched biographical account of Olive Custance. It is now, by a few hundred words,  the longest such work in print (the other two shorter ones are Father Sewell’s [1] and my own[2].) So I although I have to declare an interest, in the parliamentary sense of that term, I am perhaps as well-informed on the subject as I am opinionated, because I am deep in study of the same documents as Mr Adams. He is very much a confrère, rather than a competitor, so I hope he will not take any criticisms too much too heart. In this review I will explain why I enjoyed this article and why I also found it somewhat disappointing, at least as a biography of a poet.

Drawing largely on the work of various biographers of Lord Alfred Douglas and synthesising the information they give about Custance, Adams also gives some new information from the diaries in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library and from letters in the Eccles Collection in the British Library. I have been looking at the London documents for a few years and have bought a ticket to New York to read the documents there in February 2018.  But I have also read documents from a few other places that Adams hasn’t visited (Oxford, British Columbia, Paris). It is not a level playing field … Adams is a scholar of a whole generation of writers so he cannot be everywhere at once; I am an Olive Custance fanatic and my main research focus is her and her alone.

One oft-neglected fact about Olive Custance is that most of the poetry that made her a celebrated figure of the ‘decadent’ 1890s was the work of girl of between 15 and 17 and not of a mature woman [3]. She was a well-read young girl with a lively imagination, fed by readings of Byron, Swinburne and Pater and artistic and sophisticated playacting with her younger sister, Cécile. She never went to school, but at 16 met the delicately handsome poet, John Gray, Oscar Wilde’s former intimate and future Catholic priest. She immediately fell in love with him, as her first ‘fairy prince’. In fact she fell in love with most of the really interesting people she met from then on (aided and abetted by a maid who enjoyed living and loving vicariously, rather like Juliet’s maid in Romeo and Juliet.) One of the young men was the poet and writer Richard Le Galienne, who believed she had the makings of a poet. Once her parents could be persuaded that she was old enough to be published (it took a few years), she turned out to be quite a hit. Her poems in the popular papers such as The Pall Mall Gazette reached a far wider audience than many of the serious-minded decadents and aesthetes whose handcrafted limited editions usually never ran to more than 200 copies and who rather disdained the mass market. She eventually married Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover and her second ‘fairy prince’;  he was a better poet than she was, but neither he, nor John Gray, nor even Oscar Wilde enjoyed the worldwide attention of Olive Custance as a poet in the period known as the fin de siècle and the Edwardian era. In those days, Olive’s poems were read out during tens of thousands of peaceful family home evenings round the fire or the piano in places as far apart as London, Dublin, Kansas, Melbourne, Cape Town and Dehli; but today, of course, almost no one has heard of Olive Custance. She is known, if at all, as Oscar’s boyfriend’s wife.  That said, Adams’ work is part of a genuine revival. After the work of Nancy Hawkey[4] and Father Brocard Sewell in the 1970s there was a 40-year lull. But now, Olive Custance is coming out of the literary woodwork.

So what does Adams find in all those diaries and manuscripts? Unfortunately, the diaries do not cover her childhood or teenage years at all, and even the adult ones are often mutilated and incomplete.  This can lead to a great of deal of misconceptions, and also means one needs to do a lot of ‘joining up the dots’.  In general, Adams does this with an open mind, a strong sense of the cultural context and a deal of common sense. A breath of fresh air about her marriage, gleaned from the diaries, is that despite their complicated personalities, Bosie and Olive seem to have had a normal marital life; Adams makes a point of making a point about this because this truth has often been occluded by other writers, in their fascination for the theory that their married life was an impossible sham in sexual terms.

Adams gives more attention than has hitherto been given to Richard Le Gallienne, and this is encouraging; especially as the gossip at the time was that he and Olive had been lovers and yet scholars have for some reason tended to discount this. It all contributes to my impression that Le Gallienne was the man who was instrumental in making her reputation as a poet. Adams also seems to get all the complicated chronology around the courtship of Olive and Bosie completely right where other scholars have got muddled over it. (‘Bosie’ was the nickname of Lord Alfred Douglas, perhaps because he was “beau”.)

In regard to the poems themselves, Adams suggests that Custance was a poet who loved to bear her soul in verse, and yet most of the time he does not use her poems as a source for his biographical exposition; which is a pity as they cast a lot of light on her marriage, her beliefs, her priorities and her general outlook.  The only notable exception to this is when he makes a respectful nod to Dr Sarah Parker’s sapphic reading [5] of a number of poems. Nor does he speak much or at all about her style and development as a poet. In the end, although the account is informative and interesting, we are not left with any real impression of Custance as an artist.

There are also one or two biographical blind-spots that at the risk of seeming peevish, one feels it important to highlight. Apart from references to John Lane and the 1890s circle, we do not get a clear sense of the kind of society in which Olive grew up nor the company she kept in London later.

It is suggested that she grew up in the country, which is not quite true. The family only moved there properly when she was in her late teens, and it was in 1893 (when Olive was 19) that her father inherited the property at Weston Hall, Norfolk.  Before that time Eleanor (the mother), Cécile (born 1876) and Olive (born 1874) lived mainly in London, though no doubt many dreamy summer holidays were spent in Norfolk with their grandparents.  (The move to the country may in fact have had something to do with Colonel Custance’s disquiet about his eldest daughter’s social habits in the city.) The period covered by her published diary (1905-1910) [6] is not really covered much at all in the article, and her collections The Blue Bird (1905) and Inn of Dreams (1911) are ignored as life events and also for biographical clues they contain.

The continuing production of verses in the 20s, 30s and 40s, up to and including the Second World War, is not mentioned at all.  These gaps might not be important, but for the fact that we are only interested in her in the first place because she was a poet. Another lacuna is her conversion to Catholicism, which happened of her own accord when she was separated from her husband, and which had probably been in her mind for a long time. Such conversions were an important feature of the lives of a great many artistic people in those days, especially of ‘decadents’, so it is not an ephemeral detail. Although mention is made that at the time of her death she had lapsed, no previous mention is made of her conversion in 1917; nor is it mentioned that shortly before she died, she had expressed a desire to return to the Church.[7]  In general, although the correspondence now available does cast light on her life in the 20s and 30s, this is not adequately covered; especially as it included important and intriguing new friendships such as that with the famous Lord Leverhulme, the soap millionaire, and with the eccentric demonologist, Montague Summers. Marie Stopes is mentioned, and so is John Betjeman, but they were more friends of Bosie’s than of Olive’s.

The article is part of a larger and more ambitious project to provide extended biographical pieces about neglected ‘decadent women’ of the 1890s which will no doubt be brought together in a book in which some of what I have described as ‘gaps’ may well be filled. I have perhaps been a bit harsh in this review, but the context of the wider project perhaps puts the article’s shortcomings in perspective: Adams is mainly interested in Custance as a figure of the 1890s and it is therefore this period of her life which seems the most relevant and interesting, and the relationships of that period which seem to define her.

Father Sewell first expressed the view that Custance’s identification with decadence was nothing more than a pose; and other scholars have suggested that her labelling as a decadent is a mistake, caused simply by her intimate association with figures close to Oscar Wilde.  And yet the label sticks rather persistently. In 1920 Mary C. Sturgeon suggested that we “find in the verse of Olive Custance a complete devotion to beauty, and no other concern at all.” (Studies of Contemporary Poets, 1920, p. 402.) Based on a cursory reading of Opals and Rainbows, one can understand that opinion (even if it is an over-simplification), but even when read in a hurry the next two collections create a very different impression. Adams, however, is much rougher: “if enjoying art and sex without an apparent morality was decadent, then that is what she was.” For a real Olive Custance fan like me, that hurts. C’est trop, Monsieur Adams, c’est trop!

Walter Pater wrote in 1891 that “a true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man’s entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde’s heroes are bent on doing so speedily, as completely as they can, is … to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development.” [8] Olive Custance was more of Pater’s tribe than Wilde’s on the question of personal morality; few scholars pick this up.

So, although this new account fills some gaps in the picture, it leaves many still in need of attention, and unfortunately it fails to create an appetite to read the poetry for its own sake or for what it can tell us about the lady behind it. Olive wrote in 1905: “Like a shy child I bring you all my songs.”  The shy child, and her songs, still remain rather in the shadow of the men in her life. So there is plenty more work for people like Adams and me to do.

Edwin King published an edition of Custance’s Inn of Dreams in 2015 and is currently preparing Wild Olive: The Life and Collected Poems of Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas) for publication in 2018.

Notes

[1] Brocard Sewell, Olive Custance: Her Life and Work (London: The 1890s Society, 1975).

[2] Olive Custance, Edwin James King (Ed.), The Inn of Dreams: Poems by Olive Custance, London: Saint Austin Press,  2015.)

[3] This is stated in a letter to AJ Symons, dated 27th November 1925, in the Norman Colbeck Collection, University of British Columbia Library, Canada.

[4] Nancy Hawkes, “Olive Custance Douglas: Introduction to a Bibliography” and “Olive Custance Douglas: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Her” in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Volume 15, Number 1, 1972, pp. 49-51 and 52-56.

[5] Sarah Parker, The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013).

[6] Caspar Wintermans, I Desire the Moon: The Diary of Lady Alfred Douglas (Olive Custance), 1905–1910 (Woubrugge: The Avalon Press, 2004).

[7] Rupert Croft-Cooke, Bosie, (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1963), p. 372.

[8] Walter Pater, ‘A Novel by Mr Oscar Wilde’, The Bookman, 1, Nov. 1891, pp.59-60; reprinted in Walter Pater: Sketches and Reviews (1919).

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December 9, 2017 · 10:25 pm

‘Daffodil Dawn’, ‘Beauty’ and ‘The Vision’

After ‘God took great roses, rare and pale’, here are three more poems evocative of the Virgin Mary. All three are taken from The Inn of Dreams, edited with notes, by Edwin King, 2015. (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inn-Dreams-Poems-Olive-Custance/dp/1901157695/)

William_Adolphe_Bouguereau_Regina_Angelorum

The Virgin with Angels, c.1900 – William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

Daffodil Dawn

While I slept, and dreamed of you,
Morning, like a princess, came,
All in robe of palest blue:
Stooped and gathered in that hour
From the east a golden flower,
Great and shining flower of flame . . .
Then she hastened on her way
Singing over plain and hill–
While I slept and dreamed of you
Dreams that never can come true . .
Morning at the gates of Day,
Gathered Dawn, the daffodil!

Beauty

I saw the face of Beauty–a pale rose
In the gold dusk of her abundant hair . . .
A silken web of dreams and joys–a snare . .
A net of pleasures in a world of woes,
A bright temptation for gay youth that goes
Laughing upon his way without a care!
A shield of light for conquering Love to bear
Stronger than all the swords of all his foes.

O face of Beauty–O white dawn enshrined
In sunrise veils of splendid hair–O star!
Shine on those weary men who sadly wise
But guess thy glory faintly from afar–
Missing the marvel of thy smile–and blind
To the imperial passion in thine eyes!

The Vision

I come from lonely downs and silent woods,
With winter in my heart, a withered world,
A heavy weight of dark and sorrowful things,
And all my dreams spread out their rainbow wings,
And turn again to those bright solitudes
Where Beauty met me in a thousand moods,
And all her shining banners were unfurled . . .
And where I snatched from the sweet hands of Spring
A crystal cup and drank a mystic wine,
And walked alone a secret perfumed way,
And saw the glittering Angels at their play.
And heard the golden birds of Heaven sing,
And woke . . . to find white lilies clustering
And all the emerald wood an empty shrine,
Fragrant with myrrh and frankincense and spice,
And echoing yet the flutes of Paradise . . .

 

Notes, by Edwin King

Daffodil Dawn

It is unclear to whom the poem, first published in 1905 (in The Blue Bird), is addressed ; perhaps to her husband, perhaps to another man or woman for whom she feels a sexual desire to which she does not wish to succomb, because of her marriage commitment to Douglas and because of her moral principles. The sexual fantasies or dreams which the poetess at this time perhaps already had begun to think of as ‘impure thoughts’ disappear with the coming of the day.    Most likely the princess, draped in blue, is a reference to the Virgin Mary as well as to the dawning light. And perhaps the golden, fiery daffodil from the east is a spiritual gift to replace those ‘dreams that can never come true’.

Beauty

This poem, I am convinced, is placed deliberately after the one before it (Daffodil Dawn) for a clear, thematic reason:  Beauty is not just a celebration of feminine beauty; it takes the personification of the Dawn a step further, delicately suggesting the attractive power of the Virgin Mary. With the Catholic conversion of her husband, and with already nascent Catholic sympathies of her own, this must have been something Olive and Bosie had talked about together. In any case, the Virgin Mary had throughout the nineteenth century enjoyed a growing popularity among romantic poets, whether Catholic or not.

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking the first stanza is speaking of the deceptive ‘snare’ of worldly beauty, waiting to trap us with is suffering and pain. We have certainly encountered this in other poems. But no, this would run completely counter to the prayer-like second stanza. The sense of the first stanza is surely that celestial beauty can in fact be every bit as seductive as that of the world, the flesh and the devil. This is all about a ‘star’ (Custance’s code for the philosophical or spiritual realm) who is at once terrifyingly seductive, martial (‘imperial’), glorious and kind (the ‘smile’).

Cf. ‘Song of Songs’ 6 : 10. “Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in battle array? ” (Applied by the Catholic liturgy to the Virgin Mary).

Regarding the ‘star’, the Virgin Mary, of course, is called Star of the Sea and Star of the Morning, in Catholic mystical poems and hymns.

The Vision

‘The Vision’ continues the themes of the previous two : Wordsworthian encounters with nature, lead to a series of more and more explicit meditations on Christian spirituality. First, capitalised ‘Beauty’, and the ‘Spring’ (the Virgin ?), ‘ a crystal cup … of mystic wine’ (intimation of Holy Communion and the Blood of Christ ?), ‘Angels at play’, ‘Heaven’ … and then, before it becomes too direct and obvious, our poetess awakes. But her benevolent feminine muse has left ‘white lilies’ (the traditional sign of the Virgin Mary’s purity) and lastly ‘myrrh and frankincense’ (two of the three gifts left with Mary by the three Wise Men for the baby Jesus. The other gift, gold, has already been given to the poetess in the poem Daffodil Dawn.) The wood has become a shrine … even if it is empty. Yet something still calls gently towards Faith : ‘echoing yet the flutes of Paradise.’ We are made to wonder : was it really just a dream ? The poem’s title suggests something more.

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December 4, 2017 · 9:02 pm

The Muse is the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the pageboy…

by Edwin King

Two  leading scholars

The two most prominent modern literary scholars to help give Olive Custance the attention she deserves are Patricia Pulham and Sarah Parker. Pulham’s focus is narrow, but well-argued. She is close to Custance’s poetics and is interested mainly in her themes and language. Parker is alive to the language too, but shows a keener interest in Custance’s life and personality. They both demonstrate a real appreciation of her work and offer some valuable new insights about her poems and her life. But they mainly focus on a very few of Custance’s poems: in Pulham’s case, the three poems dedicated to statues  – The White Statue, Statues and Antinoüs – and a few others dedicated to the male form more generally; in Parker’s case, the focus is on a number of poems, published and unpublished, that she feels shed light on the poet’s exploration of her sexuality.

Finding the muse

In Opals, her first collection, Custance (OC) addresses several poems to women, but also begins to develop the idea of a ‘Fairy Prince’ who becomes an important figure for her, even before she meets Lord Alfred Douglas. Once Lord Alfred Douglas (AD) is centre stage the girl muse is comprehensively displaced. These “muses” have become a focus for critical speculation for literary scholars, especially for Parker.

Beautiful girls and boys

Parker’s main point is that OC had settled on an imaginary ideal male muse even before she fell in love with AD; this was partly as a result – it is suggested – of her being strongly influenced by two important cultural writers of her day, Pater and Wilde, who both more or less clearly expressed the view that only boys could really be beautiful, and that love of the female form was a lesser love. This perspective did not gain much traction in Victorian society in general, where the icons of beauty for most people were the exquisite virgins of Waterhouse and Millais. But in the sphere of the decadents and aesthetes it achieved a certain dominance, precisely because of certain strong personalities who promoted this boy-centred idea. In some ways the circle of poets around John Lane in the 1890s acted as an echo chamber for Pater and Wilde, so Parker has a point.  There was certainly something in the air.  But Parker links a passage in Custance’s diary, in which she sees Walter Pater ascending to Heaven like a new Elijah, as evidence of Custance’s devotion to Pater’s homoerotic aesthetics.  I think that this is really jumping to gratuitous conclusions; Pater stood for more that this.

Could it be that what Custance was drawn to in Pater was his poetic vision? To his epicurean picture of life, where the artist’s role is to live to the full, gathering and celebrating the precious jewels of our existence, weaving them somehow into a tangible artistic reality, so that the poet provides a fixed point of meaning, “while all melts under our feet.” In this way, “we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, or work of the artist’s hands. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us in the brilliancy of their gifts is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.” The objective, for Pater, is to produce a “quickened, multiplied consciousness” which gives the artistic soul a sense of stability and purpose. As a budding poet, Custance embraced this aesthetic vocation, desiring to “burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy”. (Pater, 1873.)

There is also a deep, spiritual element to Pater which helps to understand Custance and indeed many other figures of the fin de siècle. In 1885 Pater published a novel, about a very beautiful and extraordinarily sensitive youth who embarks on a search for truth, rather like St Augustine. He, and the novel, are called Marius the Epicurean; it is rarely mentioned nowadays, and that is for a number of reasons. First, Pater specifically intended Marius to be a way of correcting wrong – and worldly – interpretations of the ‘Conclusion’ to his 1873 book on the Renaissance; but perhaps mainly because Marius admires the life and teaching of the early Christians, seeing their philosophy as perpetuating the noblest of the old Roman beliefs. During the novel he moves from an appreciation for beauty to a kind of detachment, and then to the edge of belief in the Christian God. And at the point where he is ready to receive the gift of Faith, he dies. We know from her diaries that Olive Custance had previously read Marius the Epicurean, and on the death of Pater in 1894 had written in her diary that his spirit had “ascended to a fairer life” dressed in glorious golden robes, tainted with martyr’s blood. She saw him ascending to Heaven, like Marius, one surmises, that beautiful boy of his story.

Would it be out of order here to suggest a more obvious explanation for Custance’s boy muse? After all, practically all teenage girls have a picture of a kind of boy idol in their minds before they meet Mr Right? Don’t teenage boys do the same with fairytale princesses? Isn’t that why we tell them stories about beautiful princesses and handsome princes? And in the case of Olive, when we know Pater’s novel left such a profound spiritual impression on her, wasn’t she also looking for her Marius with whom she might make the journey of delight, leading, ultimately to a heavenward ascent?

New focus on Sappho

There is also the influence of Sappho to take into account, especially as since 1885, and  Henry Wharton’s new translation of her works,  the public became more aware of the same-sex attraction in some of her poetry.  But it is not completely clear that Custance was quite sure what this was all about.  She wanted to be like Sappho mainly because she wanted to be a great poet, as Sappho was. Like all girly girls, she was caught up in her own beauty and that of her girlfriends, while also looking forward to meeting her fairytale prince. It is true that Custance, after the publication of Opals in 1897, attracted attention and even fanmail, from female admirers, notably Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien who were attempting to gather a circle of women poets around them in Paris. But, in the end she rebuffed them all, and instead wooed Lord Alfred Douglas, by sending him fan-letters, praising his poetry and his looks.

Statues

Parker’s contention is that the focus on the male muse is a kind of compromise, especially when Custance is addressing her poems to statues.  Decadent male poets had liked to address male statues, in a kind of de-sexualised homoeroticism in which the coldness of marble cooled the transgressive passions …  Olive, it is suggested by Patricia Pulham, makes her male statues, opalescent, feminised … and so the androgynous boy becomes the ideal neutral territory, a safe object of worship for both boy-lovers and lesbians.

Of course the whole theme of statue-love is an old one, going back to Ovid’s character Pygamalion, and probably beyond.  And in general what such statues should be doing is to transform and enoble our aesthetic and romantic feelings, helping us see the potential for an epic, heroic and spiritual dimension to human beauty.

Inverting traditional roles?

Parker makes a lot of the notion that for a woman to write poetry in praise of the male  was an inversion of the traditional poetic relationship in which the woman is herself the muse for the male poet. Victoria Blain has already presented Elizabeth Barret Browning as somehow ground-breaking in her sonnets addressed to the male: “all of these sonnets retain their appeal not only for their subtle and tender expressions of love, but for their intriguing reversal of the standard poetic convention of a male poet addressing his female lover.”  (Blain, p. 44) Parker takes a similar line; more ground-breaking, a generation later … and Custance’s addressing of her poems to a boy instead of a girl is seen as a kind of ruse or compromise, and proof of her “queer” status. And yet, what, one wonders, would we make of Custance had all her poems been simply addressed to young girls, in order to respect “the standard poetic convention“?  In folk traditions, woman had always made this kind of poetry addressed to, or about, men (the waulking songs of the Gaelic women of the western isles are full of the praise of dashing young men); and as Douglas points out in his Autobiography we see it in Shakespeare; it is also in the Bible.

Even it is true, that in print female poets did not often risk male censure by straying into this territory, there are sufficient notable exceptions to show that there is nothing especially new in Barret’s Sonnets from the Portuguese or Custance in this regard; one could mention, for example, Emilia Lanier’s 17th century “Salve Rex Judaeorum” in which the poet praises the physical beauty of Christ on the Cross, with “his cheeks washed with milk”, his “curlèd locks/Black as a raven in her blackest hue/ His lips like scarlet threads, yet much more sweet”. A.L. Rowse calls this description “sensuous, not to say sexy” and far from seeing in it any sign of a transgressive sexuality, is touched that “for all her religiosity, it is nice to think that she was still responsive” to male beauty. (Rowse, 1978, p. 28).

The Prince and his Page

Parker also, with Pulham, makes much from the identification of OC with a Page boy and AD with a Prince.  This, we are led to believe, is more evidence of sexual confusion. The problem here is that if it is to be held that society viewed it as somehow unseemly for a woman to devote herself to a man in verse (as Parker suggests), then the ruse of adopting the guise of a pageboy, who could traditionally pledge his devotion to his master and enjoy a licence to intimacy with him (let us think, for example of Cesario – the disguised Viola – in Twelfth Night, who is only able to become intimate with Orsino, and openly declare her admiration for him, and receive his for her, because she is disguised as a page) is an obvious way out of the impasse. The ‘device’, for that is what it is, is well established in literature and culture. That OC is merely respecting a convention here, in a playful way, is easily demonstrated by a little lateral thinking: imagine if she had addressed AD as her Princess … not what would genuinely have been an inversion of roles. As is stands, it is not.

Women can love men in different ways

Women’s love poetry, as some of my pupils recently observed to me, tends to be more about depth of feeling and less about praise of the male beloved. And that has something to do with the way women love: they can often love a man who is older and less beautiful then they, whereas the first things a man looks for in a woman tend to be beauty and youth. And yet, when a woman does fall in love with a handsome man, it is perfectly natural that the sensual aspects of this love should come to the forefront of her love for him. Because of the great instinct towards reserve and modesty among women over the centuries, they are – it is true – often silent about the sensual beauty of their lovers. But mainly this is because women have been, as feminist scholars so frequently remind us, silent in general. (One of the greatest female poets of the nineteenth century Emily Dickinson, for example, published about a dozen poems in her lifetime, but another eighteen hundred were found in manuscript after her death.) So women who sing of a man in the way men often sing of women (praising their hair, their skin, their eyes, etc) are admittedly not very common. But these themes in Custance’s work do not, as Parker suggests, represent any particular ‘inversion’ of traditional roles.

As I have mentioned, in the Bible (Song of Songs), in the work of first published woman poet in English letters (Emilia Lanier), in Shakespeare and also in Douglas’s predecessors as a celebrity poet couple, the Brownings, we see time and time again, women for whom a young and handsome man is a perfectly proper muse.

To point out that taking a man as her muse in quite the way OC does was rare for her time is already stretching a point, but the assertion that heightened male eroticism in a woman poet is evidence of deep-seated lesbianism says more about the prevailing intellectual climate of this century that it does about anyone who lived in the last.

Bosie is an unreliable witness: let Olive tell her own story …

Parker refers this back to a single, much quoted passage in AD’s Autobiography, about his own sexuality and his wife’s, and uses this to suggest that AD became uncomfortable being the subject of OC’s poetic worship. She posits that his writing of his seven sonnets to her in 1907 was not so much an act of love as an act of male defiance and assertion of his masculinity. But this jars with the attitude expressed by AD in his Autobiography where he quotes, in quick succession, the adulatory letters of Olive to her ‘fairy prince’ and then one of his own Sonnets, and is obviously very proud of both. And in any case, most of the evidence that is produced is about the husband, not about the wife; and the testimony of Lord Alfred Douglas is notoriously unreliable and self-serving, as many of his biographers admit. As for those Sonnets, Olive at least accepted them delightedly at face value at the time, as tokens of deep and sincere love. Perhaps we should respect that.

With Parker’s approach to analysis of the poems, we get caught up in the old question of ‘ars specula vitae’ … is art reflecting life or life reflecting art and replaying those artistic tensions in real human relationships. My strong impression is that this analysis is just too precious. Much of Custance’s early poetry has little to do with her real life. It is just her charming  adolescent imagination at work – an imagination heavily influenced by her reading and environment, and yet a very fruitful one. As her real life takes over her mental energies, the poetic output diminishes, but the poems then certainly begin to provide a commentary on her lived experience.

Women seeking a voice

A lot of attention is given by modern scholars to the frustration of homosexuals (or at least ones of a literary bent) trying to find a voice in their society. And yet, despite the rise of feminism, not enough attention is given to the plight of middle and upper class women at the end of the nineteenth century, for whom frustration and suffocation, inside their corsets, had reached a ridiculous pitch. Forbidden from earning a living or looking after their own children, such women were beginning to seek a voice. They wanted to be ‘where it’s at’, they wanted to be up to date. Small wonder that to a certain extent they were led to despise some aspects of womanhood and femininity: they had first hand experience of how their situation as women held them back; voices like that of Pater must have been confusing, but compelling, because the prospect of a glamorous, artistic life, full of luxurious sensuality, might have seemed attractive to bored Victorian women. And yet once Pandora’s box was opened, women like Natalie Barney were able to see through the male homosexual artistic agenda that would replace heterosexual male hegemony with homosexual male hegemony, while the poor women missed their chance for liberation. (At least before women had been worshipped by poets, even if not given the vote!) Barney demolishes Pater’s suggestion that only a young man can be ultimately beautiful with the observation that boys are after all only beautiful because they look like women (speaking as Vally, in René Vivien’s roman à clef, Une Femme M’Apparut).

Byron, reflections and forced readings

In order to illustrate the way in which a preconceived idea can heavily colour our reading of a poem, I want to finish by mentioning one of the most glaring examples of Dr Parker’s imposing a forced reading on Custance’s verses. She makes a great deal of how dissolving into one’s beloved is somehow “narcissistic”, especially when one deploys the classic romantic image of being so close to the other that one sees oneself reflected in the eyes of the loved object; to my mind, the eyes are the window of the soul: so this implies the fusion of two kindred souls. The blurring of subject and object (who become one flesh, in biblical terms) is surely a primal aspect of the language of love.

And yet Parker claims that “mirror-images suggest the narcissism that was associated with both male and female homoerotic desire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: the Princess’ desire resides in the Prince’s ability to reflect her own beauty, [my italics] blurring the boundaries between self and other …  in the fifth and final poems of the sequence ‘Forget-Me-Nots’, the speaker values the beloved’s eyes for their reflective ability: ‘They see the sky like a looking glass'”.

All educated Victorian teenage girls were in love with Byron.  Germaine Greer suggests that he “was as conspicuous a figure as the multi-million-seller pop star would be today, and the most deeply affected segment of his readership was female.” (Reilly, p. xv.) So Olive, unsurprisingly, played ‘Childe Harolde’ with her little sister (Cecile, two years her junior, born in 1876)  as Ianthe, constituting the audience for Olive’s performances.  All middle and upper class teenage girls must surely have dressed up as men in childhood play (because women of their class did nothing interesting outside the home, thus severely limiting feminine dressing-up possibilities), and in any case in the Custance home, there were no boys; and Olive and Cecile never went to school. Parker, no doubt influenced by Custance’s diary accounts of her dressing up as Byron in childhood play, applies the same reasoning we have seen above applied to the poet in her twenties, to the teenage Olive: “A similar merging of self and other occurs in Custance’s unpublished poem ‘A Portrait of Lord Byron’, in which her identification with and desire for the male poet results in a narcissistic blurring of subject and object.” The poem in question begins “Oh, to have been a woman that he loved!” and Custance speaks of his strong slim hands  and divine great eyes, looking up into them to “see/A little wistful face reflected there.” (Parker, 2016, p. 90.) Much is made of Byron’s hands being slim and his eyes divine, as if that makes him effeminate. No mention is made of the fact that each adjective is paired with a more masculine one: strong and great.

What she perhaps loses sight of is that this poem of adulation is quite simply an expression of love composed by a very ‘girly’ teenage girl gazing at a portrait of her dashing, male heart-throb: nothing more, nothing less.

And the subsequent developments in her muse provide a kind of illustration of a woman, rather slowly and reluctantly, growing up.

The older Olive reminds us a great deal of the early 17th century Emilia Lanier, a mature woman, used and abused by men, falling back in mature years on the love that trumps all the others. Olive Custance, like Emilia Lanier, tried and tested by real love and the sufferings it brought her, ultimately addresses her songs not to other girls, nor to their brothers, but to Christ and his mother.

Custance speaks of her youthful self in the first poem in her last collection, The Inn of Dreams, and while still enjoying the sensual pleasures with her fairy princes, she simultaneously hopes or prays that one day, when her youth has left her, Love will come by, weeping to see her lonely, and take pity on her. In The Changeling she dreams of it too:

My spirit is a homing dove . . . [1]
I drain a crystal cup, and fall
Softly into the arms of Love . . .
And then the darkness covers all.

And in The Wings of Fortune, we see this happen even more definitively, when Christ, coming to her as a beautiful young man[2], throws away his crown of thorns; and like a second Orpheus, sings his love song to Olive’s weary soul and lifts her from death, once more young and radiant.

__________________________________

[1] Heading for Heaven, no doubt.

[2] This is my reading of the phrase ‘Love the boy’

Works cited or mentioned:

  • Blain, Virginia (2001), Victorian Women Poets: An Annotated Anthology.
  • Parker, Sarah (2011). ‘”A Girl’s Love”: Lord Alfred Douglas as Homoerotic Muse in the Poetry of Olive Custance’”, Women: A Cultural Review 22 (2-3): 220-240.
  • Parker, Sarah (2016). “Olive Custance,” The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930, Pickering & Chatto, pp. 71–100.
  • Pater, Walter (1873),”Conclusion”, Studies in the History of the Renaissance.
  • Pater, Walter (1885), Marius the Epicurean.
  • Pulham, Patricia (2007). “Tinted and Tainted Love: The Sculptural Body In Olive Custance’s Poetry”; The Yearbook of English Studies, Jan 1, 2007.
  • Reilly, Catherine, ed. (1994) Winged Words: Victorian Women’s Poetry and Verse
  • Rowe, A.L. (1978), The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.
  • Vivien, Renée (1904), Une Femme M’Apparut.

 

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December 3, 2017 · 4:33 pm

A fresh look at a forgotten flower …

In his forthcoming biography of Olive Custance, Edwin King will be seeking to tell the story of her life in a new way, using her poetry as the key …

new olive smallThere is a common misapprehension regarding many writers who convert to Catholicism; namely that conversion to Catholicism only serves to console them in difficult times, but does nothing for their art. This has especially been the case in the study of the work of some Victorian and Edwardian writers, coming out of a context in which such conversions were almost fashionable.

One thinks especially of Michael Field, the romantically connected aunt and niece duo, who wrote under a male pseudonym.  A similar analysis is sometimes made of Lord Alfred Douglas, and also of his wife, Olive Custance. In her case, there is also the suggestion abroad that making the mistake of choosing life with a man (rather than a woman) was responsible for a kind of total disillusionment with life.

In the case of Michael Field, the scholar Marion Thain, makes a good case for poetic maturity being reached by the Misses ‘Field’ through the personal journey of their conversion. I have a similar idea about Olive Custance.

Dr Sarah Parker, the most accomplished scholar on Custance to date, claims that she was deeply lesbian and needed Bosie as her ‘queer’ muse, hinting perhaps that Custance’s deep desire was, à la Camille Paglia, to be a gay man; I think that the search for Custance’s muse is an interesting issue and Parker is right that this is a key area that needs elucidation.  The poet herself speaks several times of her muse. But my strong feeling is that whilst her poetic output declined after the flurry of production in the 1890s, very much tied up with the atmosphere of literary excitement at that time in London, her search for the ultimate Muse took her to Christ and His Mother, who were able, in a sense, to fulfil all the deepest spiritual longings, even those mixed up with her sexuality.

She writes many times (after her marriage) of a celestial lady visiting her, and has Christ on his Cross casting away his crown and coming down to enfold her in his love and ‘give her back her Muse’. He is a boy-muse, sure enough, but he is Christ all the same. A similar idea of Christ casting away his crown to be closer to man occurs in a poem for Christmas 1936.

My honest impression is that Custance’s lesbianism has been vastly over-played, the deep love in the marriage underplayed,  and the religious aspect simply overlooked, even – to a certain extent – by Fr Brocard Sewell who states she converted in 1924, whereas in fact she converted in 1917, and of her own initiative. This error, so important for understanding her life, is repeated in the Introduction to the 1996 reprint of Opals and Rainbows (Thoroton, Small, eds.) and elsewhere, including more recently by Dr Sarah Parker in the chapter on Olive Custance in The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930 (2013).

So, in short, my project is to cast more light on Olive Custance, with a painstaking examination of the correspondence and diaries and any existing print works that speak of her (including contemporary reviewers); also to give a clearer picture of her art by bringing together for the first time all (or almost all) her poetry, and perhaps to come to different conclusions about the essential direction and story of her life, as expressed through the themes in her poetry.

Edwin James King, 2017.

Edwin King is compiling the Collected Works of Olive Custance, with an extensive biography, for publication in 2018. He has already published, in 2015, a re-issue of her last collection, ‘The Inn of Dreams’, with a short biographical monograph. 

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September 8, 2017 · 8:59 pm

The Berg Collection : letters and diaries

A key source for the study of Olive Custance is the collection of letters kept in the New York Library as part of the Berg Collection. The following is a librarian’s summary of what is contained in these documents.

LORD ALFRED and LADY ALFRED DOUGLAS[1]

Autograph letters and autograph diaries.

The papers in this part of the exhibition tell the story of the courtship and married life of two poets whose gift for poetry was choked by the other gifts, both good and bad, which fortune bestowed upon them. Lord Alfred Douglas was born to high social position, wealth, good looks, and a talent which produced at least a few sonnets which have been anthologized for more than half a century. Olive Custance Douglas was endowed with the same gifts on a more modest scale. The privileges which came so easily to them they threw away as thoughtlessly as they received them. Lady Douglas was not the woman to save her husband from the violence of his own emotions, which make him one of the most psychologically interesting and least appealing figures in the annals of English literature.

The papers date from the turn of the century, from shortly after the death of Oscar Wilde. They add little to the knowledge of that most famous victim of Douglas’ power to fascinate and to destroy. Yet they give a vivid glimpse of the fashionable and semi-bohemian world of the Edwardian period in which Olive Custance and Alfred Douglas met and decided to try matrimony together. The attempt was far from a success but not altogether a failure. Though their union seems to have exacted quite a price from her conventional parents, from their only child, Raymond, and even from themselves, the Douglases lived on terms of friendly separation toward the end of their lives.

The two hundred and more letters from Alfred Douglas to his wife begin in June 1901, when Olive Custance seems to have introduced herself as a “girl poet” by sending a “beautiful letter” and a “crown of wild speedwells.” They touch upon Douglas’ visit to the United States in the autumn of 1901 when he unsuccessfully attempted to barter his name for an American fortune. They cover his subsequent courtship of Olive, who seems to have been quite as worldly wise and perhaps even as experienced as the man she married on March 4 1902. There are letters from almost every year up to 1919, which embrace the troubled course of Douglas’ relations with the Custances, with Olive, and with Raymond, who was more or less of an invalid.

The two hundred and more letters from Alfred Douglas to his wife begin in June 1901, when Olive Custance seems to have introduced herself as a “girl poet” by sending a “beautiful letter” and a “crown of wild speedwells.” They touch upon Douglas’ visit to the United States in the autumn of 1901 when he unsuccessfully attempted to barter his name for an American fortune. They cover his subsequent courtship of Olive, who seems to have been quite as worldly wise and perhaps even as experienced as the man she married on March 4 1902. There are letters from almost every year up to 1919, which embrace the troubled course of Douglas’ relations with the Custances, with Olive, and with Raymond, who was more or less of an invalid.

A handful of poetic manuscripts mostly by Alfred Douglas came with the papers. Some of them are expressions of dependence on Olive and love for her. Others — not unexpectedly —are bitter attacks upon her character: “I know you now, Circe and Sycorax,” he concluded in summing up the first dozen years of their married life. There are also two manuscript poems signed Olive Custance and dedicated to John Gray: “The Songs of Love” and “The Silence of Love.” To the collection of Douglas papers was added Lord Alfred’s correspondence with Madame Francis d’Avilla, who translated some of his poems into French. The letters, which run to over one hundred, begin in 1930 and extend to within six weeks of his death on March 20 1945. Olive Douglas had died thirteen months earlier, on February 12 1944. The letters shown here cover a multitude of subjects, including Madame d’Avilla’s translation. A copy of her translation, Palmer, Paris 1937, is also displayed– the copy presented by the translator to her mother.

[1] Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox … v.68 1964, pp. 8-9.

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