Usable according to the Creative Commons License Attribution Non-commercial Share-alike.
Our editorial method is informed by social-text editing principles. By “text” we mean verbal and visual printed material, including non-referential physical elements such as bindings, page layouts, and ornaments. We view any text as the outcome of collaborative processes that have specific manifestations at precise historical moments. The Yellow Nineties Online publishes facsimile editions of a select collection of fin-de- siècle aesthetic periodicals, together with paratexts of production and reception such as cover designs, advertising materials, and reviews. This historical material is enhanced by two kinds of peer-reviewed scholarly commentary: biographies of the periodicals’ contributors and associates; and critical introductions to each title and volume by experts in the field. All scholarly material on the site is vetted by the editor(s) and peer- reviewed by them and/or an international board of advisors. The site as a whole is peer- reviewed by NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). Contributors to the site retain personal copyright in their material. The site is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Both primary and secondary materials, including all visual images, are marked up in TEI- (Textual-Encoding Initiative) compliant XML (Extensible Markup Language). To ensure maximum flexibility for users, magazines are available on the site as virtual objects (facsimiles) in FlipBook form; in HTML for online reading; in PDF for downloading and collecting; and in XML for those who wish to review and/or adapt our tag sets. In order to make ornamental devices, such as initial letters, head- and tail- pieces, searchable, we have developed a Database of Ornament in OMEKA, and linked it to the relevant pages of each magazine edition. As a dynamic structure, a scholarly website is always in process; Phase One of The Yellow Nineties Online (2010-2015) is completed and Phase Two (2016-2021) is underway.
Olive Eleanor Custance was born on February 7, 1874, the eldest daughter of
Colonel Frederic Hambledon Custance and Eleanor Constance Jolliffe. Her family
were wealthy members of the landed gentry, descended from Sir Francis Bacon
(1561-1626), and she grew up at their country seat, Weston Old Hall, Norfolk.
Given her gender and social status, it is surprising that 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 (1839-1894) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), and she had a particular penchant for the
poetry of Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909). In 1890, at
the age of 16, Custance experienced a pivotal encounter with the Decadent poet
John Gray (1866-1934) at a London party. She was
evidently inspired by Gray’s beauty (rumoured to have been the inspiration for
Wilde’s Dorian Gray) and wrote several poems addressed to a mysterious "Prince
of Dreams" who bears a scarcely veiled resemblance to him. Although their
encounter was brief, Custance and Gray continued to correspond and he offered
her advice about her poetry. Custance also struck up a close friendship with
Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947), who reviewed and
praised her work. Her early poetry was supported and encouraged by John Lane (1854-1925), who published her poem “Twilight” in Volume 3 of
Custance’s first book of poetry, entitled
Custance’s most important and long-lasting relationship was with Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945), the poet and lover of Wilde. Custance wrote to Douglas in June 1901, praising the "fairy land” of his poems and signing herself as "Opal" (which, as Patricia Pulham notes, refers not only to her debut volume but also to her changeable, flirtatious personality). The two poets began to correspond, playfully using the personas of Fairy Prince for Douglas, and Princess and boyish Page for Custance; alternating these masculine and feminine identities allowed Custance to negotiate Douglas’s bisexual desires. They arranged several meetings, but the match was threatened by Custance’s disapproving parents and Douglas’s tarnished reputation and dwindling funds, a result of his affair with Wilde.
The couple eloped on 4 March 1902 and honeymooned in Paris. This was a
particularly busy year for Custance as her second volume
The deterioration in Custance’s writing, brought on by her troubled relationship
with Douglas, from whom she separated in 1913, is reflected in her fourth and
final volume,
Olive Custance is one of a group of fin-de-siècle "female aesthete" poets who
were "rediscovered" in late twentieth-century scholarship. Nevertheless, she
remains relatively unknown even among scholars of the 1890s, except perhaps as
the wife of Lord Alfred Douglas. But Custance was in fact connected to several
key fin-de-siècle figures and at the heart of the late-Victorian literary scene.
Her four published volumes and her contributions to
© 2010, Sarah Parker
Sarah Parker is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. Her doctoral
project is a study of the poets Michael Field, Olive Custance, Amy Lowell,
Bryher and H.D. Her essay “'The darkness is the closet in which your lover
roosts her heart': Lesbians, Desire and the Gothic” was published in the