Olive Eleanor Custance, also known as Lady Alfred Douglas, was an English poet and wife of Lord Alfred Douglas. She was part of the aesthetic movement of the 1890s, and a contributor to The Yellow Book.
Photograph by Beresford, 1902
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, also known as Bosie Douglas, was an English poet and journalist, and a lover of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, that carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, starting a close but stormy relationship. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, abhorred it and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but some intimate notes were found and Wilde was later imprisoned. On his release, he briefly lived with Douglas in Naples, but they had separated by the time Wilde died in 1900. Douglas married a poet, Olive Custance, in 1902 and had a son, Raymond.
Alfred Douglas in 1903 (by George Charles Beresford)
Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, May 1893
The calling card, labelled Exhibit A in the trial (bottom left corner)
Lady Alfred Douglas