Olive Custance was a United Kingdom author and poet in the decadent and fin de siécle period. She is mainly known for her marriage to Lord Alfred Douglas, but she also was a part of the 1890s aesthetic poetry movement.
Background
Olive Eleanor Custance was born on February 7, 1874, in Weston Hall, Norfolk, United Kingdom. She was the eldest daughter of Colonel Frederic Hambledon Custance and Eleanor Constance Jolliffe. Frederic Hambledon Custance was a justice of the peace and an English military leader during the Boer War. Her family were wealthy members of the landed gentry, descended from Sir Francis Bacon, and she grew up at their country seat, Weston Old Hall, Norfolk. Given her gender and social status, from an early age, Custance began to write poetry and integrate herself into the decadent literary milieu. Her diaries show she identified with and avidly followed the careers of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and she had a particular penchant for the poetry of Algernon Swinburne. In one of her diaries that she kept as an adult, Custance wrote that she had been "a naughty...funny...fat little child, with pink cheeks and short brown hair, and big blue eyes." According to her diary, she had a flair for the dramatic and for attracting attention very early on. "My great amusement was "acting"...pretending to be someone else," she wrote. "And it was not only one person that I acted but a whole crowd. The first thing I remember acting was Robin Hood and his merry men. I did not do it as a play...I entered as it were into the words."
Career
Olive Custance's first published poem was "Twilight," which appeared in October 1894, issue of The Yellow Book, a controversial literary journal published by Custance's good friend John Lane. Her first book, Opals, was published in 1897. In 1902, she published Rainbows, her second volume of poetry, which a contributor for Academy and Literature called "markedly sincere." It showed significant growth in poetic style and thematic content. Among the themes are disillusionment with love, gender roles within relationships, and self-analysis. In the period between 1904 and 1907, Custance barely wrote anything. Poems she had written earlier, however, were compiled and published as The Blue Bird, her third book, in 1905. The first advert for The Blue Bird appears in English Review on October 28, 1905, and then in every subsequent issue. The book did not sell well, however, and in early 1906, Custance set about trying to promote this new volume herself. Photography and self-fashioning were central to her publicity strategies. Her portrait appears in Tatler in January 1906.
Custance published her fourth and final book, The Inn of Dreams, in 1911. Of the thirty-nine poems in the volume, twenty had already been published in The Blue Bird, which had sold poorly. Many critics noted that the new book lacked the qualities that had made Custance's earlier work appealing. Custance in fact continued publishing long after. For instance, she crafted at least three poems in the early 1940s in response to the Second World War.
In addition to The Yellow Book, she published poems in the Savoy, the Pall Mall Gazette, and The Sketch. Therefore, it is little surprise that she continued to successfully source locations for her work in the twentieth century, publishing poems in the English Review, the Academy, Plain English, and the Border Standard. But as a cursory glance reveals, these venues are contentious due to the right-wing and anti-Semitic material found within their pages.
Thus forty-five years on from her work in The Yellow Book, Custance maintained her commitment to Decadent nostalgia. Her poetry troubles definitions of Decadence both historically, by extending into the twentieth century, and politically, through its alignment with extreme right-wing ideologies.
Although she never published poems explicitly for children, naivety was one of Custance's dominant poetic "moods." In letters and poems, she often describes herself as a changeling or fairy's child.
Olive Custance was one of the most prolific women poets published in The Yellow Book, with poems appearing in eight of its thirteen volumes. Long after death, her poems have been included in several anthologies, as well as in Douglas Murray's Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, published in 2000. Custance's letters and diaries, along with many of her husband's letters and manuscripts, are housed in the Henry A. and Albert W. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.
Olive Custance converted to Catholicism following her husband Alfred Bruce Douglas. She gave up Catholicism after their separation.
Views
Some evidence suggests that Olive Custance was bisexual, and many of her poems describe being trapped in a male-dominated world. For these reasons, some literary scholars have labeled her as an early feminist writer.
Some may regard Olive Custance's attention to dress as something trivial. Bit this careful self-fashioning is entirely in keeping with aestheticism, in which the self becomes a work of art. Custance regarded her image as a crucial aspect of her poetic career; her dresses were poems.
Personality
Despite the often self-consciously "girlish" tone of her letters, Olive Custance was a shrewd negotiator of the periodical market.
Connections
When Olive Custance was sixteen, Custance met and fell in love with John Gray, who was the model for the main character in Oscar Wilde's classic 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Although their relationship never went beyond corresponding by letter on literary matters, Custance expressed her love for Gray in the 1892 poem "The Prince of Dreams." Later renamed "Ideal," the poem was included in Custance's first book Opals.
Shortly after the publication of the book in 1897, she received a letter of admiration from Natalie Barney, a Parisian salon hostess who would become notorious for her openly lesbian poetry published in 1900 as Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes. Barney wooed Custance with several love poems and invited her to Paris, where Custance also befriended the symbolist poet Renée Vivien, one of Barney's former lovers. Accounts of this ménage are often contradictory; Barney's autobiography Souvenirs Indiscrets (1960) states that she tried to persuade Custance to join her and Vivien in recreating a Sapphic community at Mytilene, but the endeavor was stymied by Vivien's jealousy. However, Vivien's roman à clef A Woman Appeared to Me (1904) fictionalises Custance as the "little English poetess Dagmar" and suggests that she and Custance enjoyed a brief love affair. Custance sustained contact with both Barney and Vivien after she moved back to London in 1901, and her diaries and poems suggest she continued to be attracted to and inspired by women.
Olive Custance was engaged with George Montagu. She broke the engagement to marry Alfred Douglas on March 4, 1902. They had one son, Raymond Wilfrid Sholto. The marriage was not a happy one. Even in its early years, Custance struggled to cope with Douglas's constant litigations and money problems, as well as with feeling distant from her young son.
Father:
Frederik Hambledon
Mother:
Eleanor Constance Jolliffe
husband:
Alfred Bruce Douglas
Olive Custance's correspondence with Douglas began in 1900 when she wrote to the young and handsome poet. He was the son of John Sholto Douglas, who was the eighth Marquis of Queensberry. When the two met the following year, they fell for each other almost immediately. Although their relationship grew very passionate, the marriage did not seem like an option for them because of the feelings Custance's family harbored toward Douglas owing to his notorious past. The two separated when Douglas briefly moved to the United States in hopes of finding and marrying a rich heiress. During his absence Custance had an intimate relationship with lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney before agreeing to marry George Montagu, who later became the ninth earl of Sandwich. However, Douglas returned to England in 1902, and Custance broke her engagement so that the two could resume their relationship. Knowing her father would never agree to let her marry Douglas, she eloped with him. They married on March 4, 1902, and in November of the same year Custance gave birth to the couple's only child, Raymond Wilfrid Sholto. They separated for good in 1920. In 1932, Custance moved to a cottage in Hove in East Sussex, not far from the apartment in which Douglas lived. Although the two admitted that they could not live with one another, they did see each other often and remained friends.
Son:
Raymond Wilfrid Sholto Douglas
Raymond Wilfred Sholto Douglas was born on November 17, 1902. He died on 10 October 1964 at age 61, unmarried. He gained the rank of officer in the Scots Guards. He had some problems with mental health, which made the relationships between Olive Custance and Alfred Douglas tensioned.
Friend:
Richard Le Gallienne
Richard Le Gallienne was a United Kingdom writer and poet. Olive Custance had a close friendship with Richard Le Gallienne, who reviewed and praised her work.
Friend:
John Lane
John Lane was a United Kingdom publisher, who co-founded The Bodley Head. Olive Custance's early poetry was supported and encouraged by John Lane, who published her poem "Twilight" in Volume 3 of The Yellow Book (October 1894), followed by several more of her poems in later volumes of the magazine.
Friend:
Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn, was a United Kingdom symbolist poet who wrote in French. Her poetry encloses ardent passion within rigid verse forms. She was an exacting writer, known for her mastery of the sonnet and of the rarely found 11-syllable line. Renée Vivien was an ex-lover of Natalie Clifford Barney. Olive Custance befriended her in Paris.
Friend:
Natalie Clifford Barney
Natalie Clifford Barney was a United States novelist, playwright, and poet. In Paris, where she lived, Barney had an affair with Olive Custance.
