Soon after her death, her friends organized a public subscription in Bury St Edmunds, her birthplace, where they had a fountain for horses and dogs installed in her name.

[6] Her opinion of her birthplace fluctuated; she wrote:— "That clean, quiet antiquated town, that always puts me in the mind of an old maid dressed for a party; that lowest and dreariest of Boroughs, where the streets are as full of grass as an acre of pasture land.

There, according to the hotel promotional materials, she wrote in bed, by candlelight, with the curtains drawn to keep out daylight and surrounded by purple flowers.

[8] Ouida was described by William Allingham in his diary of 1872 as of short stature, with a "sinister, clever face" and with a "voice like a carving knife.

Later she removed to the Villa Farinola at Scandicci, south of Bellosguardo, three miles from Florence, where she lived in great style, entertained largely, collected objets d'art, dressed expensively but not tastefully, drove good horses, and kept many dogs, to which she was deeply attached.

Thenceforth she chiefly wrote for the leading magazines essays on social questions or literary criticisms, which were not remunerative.

A civil list pension of £150 a year was offered to her by the prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, on the application of Alfred Austin, George Wyndham, and Walburga, Lady Paget, which she reluctantly accepted after a request by her friend, Lady Howard of Glossop, on 16 July 1906.

[10][page needed] She continued to live in Italy until her death on 25 January 1908, at 70 Via Zanardelli, Viareggio, of pneumonia.

It expressed sympathy for the French colonists (called pieds noirs) – with whom Ouida deeply identified – and, to some extent, the Arabs.

[14] The American author Jack London cited her novel Signa (1875), which he read at the age of eight, as one of the eight reasons for his literary success.

[15] The British composer Frederic Hymen Cowen and his librettists Gilbert Arthur à Beckett, H. A. Rudall, and Frederic Edward Weatherly acquired the rights to Ouida's 1875 novel Signa to create an opera for Richard D'Oyly Carte's Royal English Opera House to succeed Arthur Sullivan's Ivanhoe in 1891.

After many delays and production troubles, Cowen's Signa was first performed in a reduced three-act version at the Teatro Dal Verme, Milan on 12 November 1893.

After further revision and much cutting, it was later given in a two-act version at Covent Garden, London on 30 June 1894, at which point Cowen wondered if there was any sense left in the opera at all.

His friend Giacomo Puccini became interested in the story and began a court action, claiming that because Ouida was in debt, the rights to her works should be put up for public auction to raise funds for creditors.

[17] Soon after her death, her friends organized a public subscription in Bury St Edmunds, where they had a fountain for horses and dogs installed in her name.