THE scene is Wilfrid Bertram’s rooms in Piccadilly, facing the Green Park. The time is six o’clock in the afternoon. The audience is a goodly number of men and women of that class which calls itself Society. The rooms are small and the guests are many. A few look contemptuously amused. A great many appear excruciatingly bored. “It’s all rot!” says one gentleman in confidence to his walking-stick. It is the general opinion, though it has but one spokesman. “What a shame, when he is so much in earnest!” says a pretty girl. “Bores always are awfully in earnest,” replies the critic. “If he’d only give us something to drink——” “You can get plenty to drink in the street,” says the young lady, with a withering glance. Meantime, Wilfrid Bertram, who has been speaking for more than an hour without contradiction, except such as he read on his friends’ faces, perceives at last that he has been wearying them; a knowledge which is always slow to steal upon the teacher of mankind. He stops in the middle of a very fine peroration. “My dear people,” he remarks, a little irritably—“I mean, ladies and gentlemen—if you are so soon weary of so illimitable a subject, I fear I must have failed to do it justice.” “So soon?—oh, hang it!” says the man who has wished for something to drink. “We came upstairs at half-past four, and you’ve had all the jaw to yourself ever since, and it’s past six now, and we’re all as thirsty as dogs.” An expression of extreme disdain passes over the lecturer’s face. “I did not invite you, Lord Marlow,” he says, very coldly. “If I had done I would have provided beer and skittles for your entertainment.” “Oh, I say Wilfrid, come, finish your address to us; it’s extremely interesting,” observes, in amiable haste, a much older man, with a bald head and pleasant, ruddy countenance, who is his uncle, Lord Southwold. “Immensely interesting!” echo everybody: they can say so with animation, almost with veracity, now that they are aware it is drawing to an end. “I ask your pardon if my infirmities have done injustice to a noble theme. I fear I have failed to make myself intelligible,” says Bertram, in a tone intended to be apologetic, but which is actually only aggressive, since it plainly implies that his pearls have been thrown before swine. He closes the manuscript and note-books which are lying before him with the air of a person who is prepared for anything from the obtuseness and ingratitude of humanity.

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. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a broad range of contextual documents, including contemporary reactions to Ouida’s fiction and a selection of nineteenth-century writings on marriage, feminism, and the aristocracy.