Showing posts with label della Stufa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label della Stufa. Show all posts

Sunday, 13 July 2014

Ouida and the death of her Italian nobleman: curse or coincidence?

Deaths, illnesses and misfortunes that seem to be natural, accidental, unavoidable or just coincidences – after all, stuff happens and such things are part of life – may seem less innocent when other, similar incidents are taken into account and patterns start to emerge. 

Reading about the convenient (for J. M. Barrie) death of the Llewelyn Davies boys’ father has reminded me of another death, which I learned about from biographies of the Victorian novelist Ouida. 

Thinking about the curse that Biddy Iremonger put on the man she hoped to marry when he chose someone else and the Kathleen Raine/Gavin Maxwell affair, not to mention the Brontë family’s misfortunes and the jilted woman in Patrick Brontë’s past, makes me wonder whether Ouida could have been indirectly responsible for the death of an Italian nobleman, someone she was infatuated with and hoped to marry.