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OLIVE CUSTANCE moved easily within important literary movements in the last decade of the nineteenth century, from the English Decadents to the American-French group of Sapphic poets around Natalie Barney. a significant contributor to The Yellow Book and writer of four volumes of poetry, published from 1897 to 1911, she has been referred to as one of the three "principal women poets of the day" (the others being Dollie Radford and Alice Meynell).1 Her work has endured-her poetry was the only one of two samples from women poets included in Karl Beckson's 1982 landmark anthology Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s (the other is Michael Field) and she is one of the subjects of a recent academic study of "the lesbian muse" by Sarah Parker.2
Custance occupied a key position in the literary life of the late nineteenth century not just because of her writing but because of her relationships. She knew John Lane well, she had relationships which stopped short of affairs with John Gray and Henry Harland; and one which may well have been physically intimate with Richard Le Gallienne. She also had affairs with the lesbian poets Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien, which put her into another literary coterie. Her long and troubled marriage to Lord Alfred Douglas placed her among the circle of Oscar Wilde. She did not know Wilde personally, but always cherished his memory.
Olive Custance has never had a full biography devoted to her and has no independent entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. She shares her husband's entry just as she finds a place in the many biographies of him.3 However, she was involved in the literary world of the 1890s long before her relationship with him. Likewise, her engagement with Natalie Barney and her circle was quite independent of her relationship with Douglas (though he also had a friendship with Barney after Olive introduced them). This article is based on an intensive reading of the largely unpublished, often fragmentary (sometimes quite literally so) diaries of Custance, along with material recently made fully publicly available as part of the Eccles Bequest to the British Library. Some letters, from Harland, Barney and Vivien, have not previously been reproduced and other material can be found only in limited...