Massarenes

Ouida's final novel is a wicked, glittering attack on the machinery of English social advancement. The Massarenes, newly rich from South African diamonds, arrive in London with everything money can buy and one desperate hunger: acceptance into the aristocracy. Through Lady Kenilworth, a calculating woman who trades in human ambitions, they purchase their way toward respectability. But what they find there is far stranger than what they sought. This is a novel about the grotesque comedy of trying to buy what cannot be sold, and the price exacted in dignity when one negotiates with the establishment. The satire cuts both ways: the aristocracy here is as ridiculous as the parvenus, and Ouida relishes exposing the hypocrisies of every class. Yet there's a melancholy beneath the excess, a sadness for what money cannot purchase: genuine belonging, authentic connection, a self not contingent on the approval of one's betters.