Guilderoy

£250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A story about an aristocratic aesthete and the foibles, inconsistencies, and uncertainties of love. First published in 1889 Guilderoy was reviewed favourably by Oscar Wilde in the Pall Mall Gazette: “Ouida is the last of the romantics … She tries to make passion, imagination, and poetry part of fiction. She still believes in heroes and in heroines. She is florid and fervent and fanciful. Yet even she, the high priestess of the impossible, is affected by her age. Her last book, Guilderoy as she calls it, is an elaborate psychological study of modern temperaments. For her, it is realistic, and she has certainly caught much of the tone and temper of the society of our day. Her people move with ease and grace and indolence. The book may be described as a study of the peerage from a poetical point of view … It is a resplendent picture of our aristocracy… The central figures are exaggerated, but the background is admirable. In spite of everything, it gives one a sense of something like life. What is the story? Well, we must admit that we have a faint suspicion that Ouida has told it to us before. Lord Guilderoy, ‘whose name was as old as the days of Knut,’ falls madly in love, or fancies that he falls madly in love, with a rustic Perdita, a provincial Artemis who has ‘a Gainsborough face, with wide-opened questioning eyes and tumbled auburn hair.’ She is poor but well-born, being the only child of Mr. Vernon of Llanarth, a curious recluse, who is half a pedant and half Don Quixote.

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