Olive Custance is best known for her association with some of the decadent era's most notable people: the publisher John Lane, the poet Richard Le Gallienne, the artist Aubrey Beardsley, and one of the most notorious men of the 1890s--her husband, Lord Alfred Douglas. Nevertheless, she earned moderate success with her poetry. Her poems appeared in periodicals such as Lane's The Yellow Book, to which she was a frequent contributor, and between 1897 and 1911 she published four volumes of poetry. Reviewers pointed to her simplistic, almost childish themes, trite language, and exaggerated use of punctuation. But even the most severe critics acknowledged that Custance's poems had an ineffable charm and moments that pointed toward a bright potential. Despite her classification as a minor poet, Custance has been mentioned or anthologized in many works dealing with the fin de siècle.

Olive Eleanor Custance was born on 7 February 1874, the...