OUIDA, [Marie Louise de la Ramée]
Moths
"Marriage could never bring her aught better than it brought her already - a luxurious and ornamented slavery..."
“This world you will be launched in does no woman good. It is a world of moths. Half the moths are burning themselves in feverish frailty, the other half are corroding and consuming all that they touch. Do not become of either kind…”
“First published in 1880, Moths addresses such Victorian taboos as adultery, domestic violence, and divorce in vivid and flamboyant prose. The beautiful young heroine, Vere Herbert, suffers at the hands of both her tyrannical mother and her dissipated husband, and is finally united with her beloved, a famous opera singer. Moths was Ouida’s most popular work, and its melodramatic plot, glamorous European settings, and controversial treatment of marriage make it an important, as well as a highly entertaining, example of the nineteenth-century “high society” novel.” (Broadview Press website, accessed December 2023).
Moths was the first of Ouida’s novels to be made into a film (1913).
Hinges cracking, joints rubbed, still in good order.
