Olive Custance: A Poet Crossing Boundaries

Olive Custance has no independent entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. Yet she occupied a key position in the literary life of the late nineteenth century not just because of her writing but because of her relationships with figures such as John Lane, John Gray, Henry Harland, Richard Le Gallienne, and Lord Alfred Douglas (to whom she was married). She had affairs with the lesbian poets Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien, which put her into another literary coterie. This article is based on an intensive reading of the largely unpublished diaries of Custance, along with material recently made publicly available as part of the Eccles Bequest to the British Library.