Margaret Oliphant

Margaret Oliphant
Margaret Oliphant, from the frontispiece of A Literary History of England from 1760 to 1825
Born	Margaret Oliphant Wilson (1828-04-04)4 April 1828 Wallyford, Scotland
Died	Wimbledon, London
Genre	Romance
Signature

Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (née Margaret Oliphant Wilson) (4 April 1828 – 25 June 1897), was a Scottish novelist and historical writer, who usually wrote as Mrs. Oliphant. Her fictional works encompass "domestic realism, the historical novel and tales of the supernatural".

Life

The daughter of Francis W. Wilson (c.1788–1858), a clerk, and his wife, Margaret Oliphant (c.1789–1854), she was born at Wallyford, near Musselburgh, East Lothian, and spent her childhood at Lasswade (near Dalkeith), Glasgow and Liverpool. As a girl, she constantly experimented with writing. In 1849 she had her first novel published: Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland. This dealt with the Scottish Free Church movement, with which Mr. and Mrs. Wilson both sympathised, and met with some success. It was followed by Caleb Field in 1851, the year in which she met the publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh and was invited to contribute to the famous Blackwood's Magazine. The connection was to last for her whole lifetime, during which she contributed well over 100 articles, including, a critique of the character of Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

In May 1852, she married her cousin, Frank Wilson Oliphant, at Birkenhead, and settled at Harrington Square in London. An artist working mainly in stained glass, her husband had delicate health, and three of their six children died in infancy, while the father himself developed alarming symptoms of consumption. For the sake of his health they moved in January 1859 to Florence, and then to Rome, where Frank Oliphant died. His wife, left almost entirely without resources, returned to England and took up the burden of supporting her three remaining children by her own literary activity.

Memorial to Mrs Oliphant in St Giles Cathedral Edinburgh.

She had now become a popular writer, and worked with amazing industry to sustain her position. Unfortunately, her home life was full of sorrow and disappointment. In January 1864 her only remaining daughter Maggie died in Rome, and was buried in her father's grave. Her brother, who had emigrated to Canada, was shortly afterwards involved in financial ruin, and Mrs. Oliphant offered a home to him and his children, and added their support to her already heavy responsibilities.

In 1866 she settled at Windsor to be near her sons who were being educated at Eton. That year, her second cousin, Annie Louisa Walker, came to live with her as a companion-housekeeper. This was her home for the rest of her life, and for more than thirty years she pursued a varied literary career with courage scarcely broken by a series of the gravest troubles. The ambitions she cherished for her sons were unfulfilled. Cyril Francis, the elder, died in 1890, leaving a Life of Alfred de Musset, incorporated in his mother's Foreign Classics for English Readers, The younger, Francis (whom she called "Cecco"), collaborated with her in the Victorian Age of English Literature and won a position at the British Museum, but was rejected by Sir Andrew Clark, a famous physician. Cecco died in 1894. With the last of her children lost to her, she had but little further interest in life. Her health steadily declined, and she died at Wimbledon, London, on 25 June 1897.

In the 1880s she was the literary mentor of the Irish novelist Emily Lawless. During this time Oliphant wrote several works of supernatural fiction, including the long ghost story A Beleaguered City (1880) and several short tales, including "The Open Door" and "Old Lady Mary".

Gallery

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  Portrait of Oliphant, by Frederick Augustus Sandys, chalk, 1881.

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  Albumen carte-de-visite, by Thomas Rodger, ca. 1860s.

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  Margaret Oliphant, by Janet Mary Oliphant, 1895.

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  Margaret Oliphant, by Hills & Saunders.

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  Margaret Oliphant and her family in Windsor, 1874.

Works

Oliphant, during an often difficult life, wrote more than 120 works, including novels, books of travel and description, histories, and volumes of literary criticism.

Novels

• Margaret Maitland (1849).
• Merkland (1850).
• Caleb Field (1851).
• John Drayton (1851).
• Adam Graeme (1852).
• The Melvilles (1852).
• Katie Stewart (1852).
• Harry Muir (1853).
• Ailieford (1853).
• The Quiet Heart (1854).
• Magdalen Hepburn (1854).
• Zaidee (1855).
• Lilliesleaf (1855).
• Christian Melville (1855).
• The Athelings (1857).
• The Days of My Life (1857).
• Orphans (1858).
• The Laird of Norlaw (1858).
• Agnes Hopetoun's Schools and Holidays (1859).
• Lucy Crofton (1860).
• The House on the Moor (1861).
• The Last of the Mortimers (1862).
• Heart and Cross (1863).
• The Chronicles of Carlingford in Blackwood's Magazine (1862–1865), republished as:
  • Salem Chapel (1863).
  • The Rector (1863).
  • Doctor's Family (1863).
  • The Perpetual Curate (1864).
  • Miss Marjoribanks (1866).
  • Phoebe Junior (1876).
• A Son of the Soil (1865).
• Agnes (1866).
• Madonna Mary (1867).
• Brownlows (1868).
• The Minister's Wife (1869).
• The Three Brothers (1870).
• John: A Love Story (1870).
• Squire Arden (1871).
• At his Gates (1872).
• Ombra (1872).
• May (1873).
• Innocent (1873).
• The Story of Valentine and his Brother (1875).
• A Rose in June (1874).
• For Love and Life (1874).
• Whiteladies (1875).
• An Odd Couple (1875).
• The Curate in Charge (1876).
• Carità (1877).
• Young Musgrave (1877).
• Mrs. Arthur (1877).
• The Primrose Path (1878).
• Within the Precincts (1879).
• The Fugitives (1879).
• A Beleaguered City (1879).
• The Greatest Heiress in England (1880).
• He That Will Not When He May (1880).
• In Trust (1881).
• Harry Joscelyn (1881).
• Lady Jane (1882).
• A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen (1882).
• The Lady Lindores (1883).
• Sir Tom (1883).
• Hester (1883).
• It Was a Lover and his Lass (1883).
• The Lady's Walk (1883).
• The Wizard's Son (1884).
• Madam (1884).
• The Prodigals and their Inheritance (1885).
• Oliver's Bride (1885).
• A Country Gentleman and his Family (1886).
• A House Divided Against Itself (1886).
• Effie Ogilvie (1886).
• A Poor Gentleman (1886).
• The Son of his Father (1886).
• Joyce (1888).
• Cousin Mary (1888).
• The Land of Darkness (1888).
• Lady Car (1889).
• Kirsteen (1890).
• The Mistery of Mrs. Biencarrow (1890).
• Sons and Daughters (1890).
• The Railway Man and his Children (1891).
• The Heir Presumptive and the Heir Apparent (1891).
• The Marriage of Elinor (1891).
• Janet (1891).
• The Cuckoo in the Nest (1892).
• Diana Trelawny (1892).
• The Sorcerers (1893).
• A House in Bloomsbury (1894).
• Sir Robert's Fortune (1894).
• Who Was Lost and is Found (1894).
• Lady William (1894).
• Two Strangers (1895).
• Old Mr. Tredgold (1895).
• The Unjust Steward (1896).
• The Ways of Life (1897).

Short stories

• Neighbours on the Green (1889).
• A Widow's Tale and Other Stories (1898).
• That Little Cutty (1898).
• "The Open Door." In: Great Ghost Stories (1918).

Selected articles

• "Mary Russel Mitford," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 75, 1854.
• "Evelin and Pepys," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 76, 1854.
• "The Holy Land," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 76, 1854.
• "Mr. Thackeray and his Novels," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 77, 1855.
• "Bulwer," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 77, 1855.
• "Charles Dickens," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 77, 1855.
• "Modern Novelists—Great and Small," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 77, 1855.
• "Modern Light Literature: Poetry," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 79, 1856.
• "Religion in Common Life," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 79, 1856.
• "Sidney Smith," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 79, 1856.
• "The Laws Concerning Women," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 79, 1856.
• "The Art of Caviling," Backwood's Magazine, Vol. 80, 1856.
• "Béranger," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 83, 1858.
• "The Condition of Women," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 83, 1858.
• "The Missionary Explorer," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 83, 1858.
• "Religious Memoirs," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 83, 1858.
• "Social Science," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 88, 1860.
• "Scotland and her Accusers," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 90, 1861.
• "Girolamo Savonarola," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 93, 1863.
• "The Life of Jesus," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 96, 1864.
• "Giacomo Leopardi," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 98, 1865.
• "The Great Unrepresented," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 100, 1866.
• "Mill on the Subjection of Women," The Edinburgh Review, Vol. 130, 1869.
• "The Opium-Eater," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 122, 1877.
• "Russian and Nihilism in the Novels of I. Tourgeniéf," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 127, 1880.
• "School and College," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 128, 1880.
• "The Grievances of Women," Fraser's Magazine, New Series, Vol. 21, 1880.
• "Mrs. Carlyle," The Contemporary Review, Vol. 43, May 1883.
• "The Ethics of Biography," The Contemporary Review, July 1883.
• "Victor Hugo," The Contemporary Review, Vol. 48, July/December 1885.
• "A Venetian Dynasty," The Contemporary Review, Vol. 50, August 1886.
• "Laurence Oliphant," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 145, 1889.
• "Tennyson," Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 152, 1892.
• "Addison, the Humorist," Century Magazine, Vol. 48, 1894.
• “The Anti-Marriage League,” Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. 159, 1896.

Biographies

Her biographies of Edward Irving (1862) and her cousin Laurence Oliphant (1892), together with her life of Sheridan in the English Men of Letters series (1883), show vivacity and a sympathetic touch. She also wrote biographies of Francis of Assisi (1871) and Scottish theologian John Tulloch.

Historical and critical works

• Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II (1869)
• The Makers of Florence (1876)
• A Literary History of England from 1760 to 1825 (1882)
• The Makers of Venice (1887)
• Royal Edinburgh (1890)
• Jerusalem (1891)
• The Makers of Modern Rome (1895)
• William Blackwood and his Sons (1897)
• "The Sisters Brontë." In: Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign (1897)

At the time of her death, Oliphant was still working on Annals of a Publishing House, a record of the progress and achievement of the firm of Blackwood, with which she had been so long connected. Her Autobiography and Letters, which present a touching picture of her domestic anxieties, appeared in 1899. Only parts were written with a wider audience in mind: she had originally intended the Autobiography for her son, but he died before she had finished it.

Critical reception

M. R. James admired Oliphant's supernatural fiction, and stated that "the religious ghost story, as it may be called, was never done better than by Mrs. Oliphant in "The Open Door" and A Beleaguered City". Mary Butts lauded Oliphant's ghost story "The Library Window", describing it as "one masterpiece of sober loveliness".

Revival of interest

Interest in Mrs. Oliphant's work declined in the 20th century. In the mid-1980s, a small-scale revival was led by the publishers Alan Sutton and Virago Press, centred on the Carlingford series and some similarities of subject-matter with the work of Anthony Trollope.

Penguin Books in 1999 published an edition of Miss Marjoribanks (1866). Hester (1873) was reissued in 2003 by Oxford World's Classics. In 2007–2009, the Gloucester publisher Dodo Press reprinted half a dozen of Oliphant's works. In 2010, both the British Library and Persephone Books reissued The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow (1890), in the latter case with the novella Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund (1886), and the Association for Scottish Literary Studies produced a new edition of the novel Kirsteen (1890).

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a four-hour dramatisation of Miss Marjoribanks in August/September 1992 and a four-hour dramatisation of Phoebe Junior in May 1995. A 70-minute adaptation of Hester was broadcast on Radio 4 in January 2014.

Russell Hoban also alludes to Oliphant's fiction in his 2003 novel Her Name Was Lola.

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: 

Further reading

• D'Albertis, Deirdre (1997). "The Domestic Drone: Margaret Oliphant and a Political History of the Novel," Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 805–829.
• Clarke, John Stock. Margaret Oliphant: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources 1848–2005.
• Clarke, John Stock. Margaret Oliphant: Non-Fiction Bibliography.
• Clarke, John Stock Margaret Oliphant: Fiction Bibliography.
• Colby, Vineta and Robert Colby (1966). The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and the Victorian Literary Market Place. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books.
• Garnett, Richard (1901). "Oliphant, Margaret Oliphant." In: Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement, Vol. III. New York: The Macmillan Company, pp. 230–234.
• Halsey, Francis W. (1899). "Mrs. Oliphant," The Book Buyer, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 111–113.
• Jay, Elisabeth (1994). Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself" – A Literary Life. Oxford University Press.
• Kämper, Birgit (2001). Margaret Oliphant's Carlingford Series: An Original Contribution to the Debate on Religion, Class, and Gender in the 1860s and '70s. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
• Michie, Elsie B. (2001). "Buying Brains: Trollope, Oliphant, and Vulgar Victorian Commerce," Victorian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 77–97.
• "Mrs. Oliphant and her Rivals," The Scottish Review, Vol. 30, 1897, pp. 282–300.
• "Mrs. Oliphant," The Living Age, Vol. 214, 1897, pp. 403–407.
• "Mrs. Oliphant as a Novelist," The Living Age, Vol. 215, 1897, pp. 74–85.
• "Mrs. Oliphant's Autobiography," The Scottish Review, Vol. 34, 1899, pp. 124–138.
• "Mrs. Oliphant's Autobiography," The Quarterly Review, Vol. 190, 1899, pp. 255–267.
• Nicoll, W. Robertson (1897). "Mrs. Oliphant," The Bookman, Vol. 5, pp. 484–86.
• O'Gorman, Francis (2011). "Margaret Oliphant and The Cornhill in 1889," Notes and Queries, Vol. LVIII, No. 4, December 2011, Pages 567–68.
• Onslow, Barbara (1998). "'Humble Comments for the Ignorant': Margaret Oliphant's Criticism of Art and Society," Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 55–74.
• Peterson, Linda H. (1979). "Audience and the Autobiographer's Art: An Approach to the Autobiography of Mrs. M.O.W. Oliphant." In: Approaches to Victorian Autobiography. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, pp. 158–48.
• Preston, Harriet Waters (1885). "Mrs. Oliphant," The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 55, pp. 733–744.
• Preston, Harriet Waters (1897). "Mrs. Oliphant," The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 80, pp. 424–427.
• Preston, Harriet Waters (1897). "Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant." In: Library of the World's Best Literature, Vol. XIX. New York: R.S. Peale & J.A. Hill.
• Preston, Harriet Waters (1899). "The Autobiography of Mrs. Oliphant," The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 84, pp. 567–573.
• Rubik, Margarete (1994). The Novels of Mrs Oliphant, A Subversive View of Traditional Themes. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
• Sime, Georgina & Frank Nicholson (1952). "Recollections of Mrs. Oliphant." In: Brave Spirits. London: Privately Printed, Distributed by Simpkin Marshall & Co., pp. 25–55.
• "The Life and Writings of Mrs. Oliphant," The Edinburgh Review, Vol. 190, 1899, pp. 26–47.
• Trela, D.J. (1995). Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press.
• Trela, D.J. (1996). "Margaret Oliphant, James Anthony Froude and the Carlyles' Reputations: Defending the Dead," Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 199–215.
• Walker, Hugh (1921). The Literature of the Victorian Era. Cambridge University Press.
• Williams, Merryn (1986). Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography. New York: St. Martin's Press.
• "Works by Mrs. Oliphant," The British Quarterly Review, Vol. 49, 1869, pp. 301–329.

External links

• The Margaret Oliphant Fiction Collection – all novels and stories with summaries, pictures, links, series, themes.
• Works by Margaret Oliphant at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Margaret Oliphant at Internet Archive
• Works by Margaret Oliphant at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Margaret Oliphant at The Victorian Web
• Basketful of Fragments: Krystyna Weinstein's 'fictional autobiography' of Margaret Oliphant
• Archival material relating to Margaret Oliphant listed at the UK National Archives
• Author Profile at Persephone Books
• The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow at Persephone Books