Michael Henderson suggests

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A subject in need of a writer

Allan Massie

Tuesday, 1st April 2008

Allan Massie celebrates Ouida

At Palermo it has been decreed by municipal edict that, as it is contrary to hygiene for the petticoats of women to sweep up the dust of the streets in which the spittal of all the sufferers from tuberculosis may have fallen and dried in the sun, all women who walk in Palermo are to shorten their skirts! Health, it is austerely added, is more important than fashion!

These essays have passages of absurdity but are also full of sense. Read her ‘Unwritten Literary Laws’ or the essay on Joseph Chamberlain with its condemnation of imperial wars, and the observation that ‘the English citizen and peasant know nothing in their own land of the horrors of war.’ Out of date? Five years after the invasion of Iraq?

A remarkable woman and a remarkable writer, well worth that biography I asked for. Will some clever and sympathetic author please write it.

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