Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (born Margaret Oliphant Wilson; 4 April 1828 – 20 June 1897[1]) was a
Scottish novelist and historical writer, who usually wrote as Mrs. Oliphant.[2] Her fictional works cover "domestic realism, the historical novel and tales of the supernatural".[3]
Life
Margaret was born at
Wallyford, near
Musselburgh, East Lothian, as the only daughter and youngest surviving child of Margaret Oliphant (c. 1789 – 17 September 1854) and Francis W. Wilson (c. 1788–1858), a clerk.[4][5] She spent her childhood at
Lasswade,
Glasgow and
Liverpool. Oliphant Gardens, a street in Wallyford, is named after her. As a girl, she continually experimented with writing. She had her first novel published, Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland, in 1849. This dealt with the relatively successful
Scottish Free Church movement, with which her parents sympathised. Next came Caleb Field in 1851, the year she met the publisher
William Blackwood in Edinburgh and was invited to contribute to Blackwood's Magazine – a tie that continued for her lifetime and covered over 100 articles, including a critique of the character of
Arthur Dimmesdale in
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
In May 1852, Margaret married her cousin,
Frank Wilson Oliphant, at
Birkenhead and settled at
Harrington Square, now in
Camden, London. Her husband was an artist working mainly in
stained glass. Three of their six children died in infancy.[6] Her husband developed tuberculosis and for his health they moved in January 1859 to
Florence and then to
Rome, where he died. This left Oliphant in need of an income. She returned to England and took up literature to support her three surviving children.[7]
She had become a popular writer by then and worked notably hard to sustain her position. Unfortunately, her home life was full of sorrow and disappointment. In January 1864 her one 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. Oliphant offered a home to him and his children, adding their support to already heavy responsibilities.[7]
In 1866 she settled at
Windsor to be near her sons, who were attending
Eton. That year, her second cousin,
Annie Louisa Walker, came to live with her as a companion-housekeeper.[9] Windsor was her home for the rest of her life. Over more than 30 years she pursued a varied literary career, but personal troubles continued. Her ambitions for her sons remained 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.[10] 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. He died in 1894. With the last of her children lost to her, she had little further interest in life. Her health steadily declined and she died at
Wimbledon on 20 June 1897.[7][1][11] She was buried in
Eton beside her sons.[8] She left a personal estate worth a gross £4,932 and a net value £804.[1]
In the 1880s Oliphant acted as literary mentor of the Irish novelist
Emily Lawless. During that time, Oliphant wrote several works of supernatural fiction, including a long
ghost storyA Beleaguered City (1880) and several short tales, including "The Open Door" and "Old Lady Mary".[12] Oliphant also wrote historical fiction. Magdalen Hepburn (1854) is set during the
Scottish Reformation, and features
Mary, Queen of Scots and
John Knox as characters.[13]
Gallery
Portrait of Oliphant, by Frederick Augustus Sandys, chalk, 1881.
Albumen carte-de-visite, by Thomas Rodger, ca. 1860s.
Margaret Oliphant, by Janet Mary Oliphant, 1895.
Margaret Oliphant, by Hills & Saunders.
Margaret Oliphant and her family in Windsor, 1874.
Works
Oliphant wrote more than 120 works, including novels, books of travel and description, histories, and volumes of literary criticism.[7]
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:
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.[17]
Critical reception
Opinions on Oliphant's work are split, with some critics seeing her as a "domestic novelist", while others recognise her work as influential and important to the Victorian literature canon. Critical reception from Oliphant's contemporaries is divided as well. Among those who were not in favour of Oliphant was
John Skelton, who took the view that Oliphant wrote too much and too fast.[18] Writing a Blackwood's article called "A Little Chat About Mrs. Oliphant", he asked, "Had Mrs. Oliphant concentrated her powers, what might she not have done? We might have had another
Charlotte Brontë or another
George Eliot."[19] Not all of the contemporary reception was negative, though.
M. R. James admired Oliphant's supernatural fiction, concluding 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".[20]Mary Butts lauded Oliphant's ghost story "The Library Window", describing it as "one masterpiece of sober loveliness".[21] Principal
John Tulloch praised her "large powers, spiritual insight, and purity of thought, and subtle discrimination of many of the best aspects of our social life and character".[22]
More modern critics of Oliphant's work include Virginia Woolf, who asked in Three Guineas whether Oliphant's autobiography does not lead the reader "to deplore the fact that Mrs. Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children."[23] However, even modern critics are divided on Oliphant's work. Authors
Gilbert and
Gubar did not include Oliphant in their "Great tradition" of women's writing because she did not question or challenge the patriarchy at the time of her life and writing.[18]
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[24] and
Virago Press, centred on the Carlingford series and some similarities of subject-matter with the work of
Anthony Trollope.[25]
Penguin Books in 1999 published an edition of Miss Marjoribanks (1866).[26]Hester (1873) was reissued in 2003 by
Oxford World's Classics.[27] 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),[28] and the
Association for Scottish Literary Studies produced a new edition of the novel Kirsteen (1890).[29]
BBC Radio 4 broadcast four-hour dramatisations of Miss Marjoribanks in August/September 1992 and Phoebe Junior in May 1995. A 70-minute adaptation of Hester was broadcast on Radio 4 in January 2014.[30]
Russell Hoban alludes to Oliphant's fiction in his 2003 novel Her Name Was Lola.[31]
^"Deaths". The Times. No. 21850. London. 19 September 1854. p. 1. Retrieved 11 November 2017.
^According to Elizabeth Jay, in the introduction of Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography (published in 2002), p. 9, one of these children died aged one day, another, Stephen Thomas, at nine weeks, and Marjorie, the other daughter, at about eight months. The surviving children were Maggie (died in 1864), Cyril Francis, "Tiddy" (died in 1890) and Francis Romano, "Cecco" (died in 1894). However, The Victorian Web mentions seven children. See also Elisabeth Jay: Oliphant, Margaret Oliphant... In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004).
Retrieved 14 November 2010. Subscription required. for the countless dependents she supported through much of her life.
^
abThe new nineteenth century : feminist readings of underread Victorian fiction. Harman, Barbara Leah., Meyer, Susan, 1960-. New York: Garland Pub. 1996.
ISBN081531292X.
OCLC33948483.{{
cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (
link)
^Skelton, John. "A Little Chat About Mrs. Oliphant". Blackwood's Magazine. 133: 73–91.
^M. R. James,"Some Remarks on Ghost Stories", in The Bookman, December 1929. Reprinted in James, Collected Ghost Stories, edited by Darryl Jones. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2011.
ISBN9780199568840 (p. 414)
^Mary Butts, "Ghosties and Ghoulies: The Uses of the Supernatural in English Fiction" (1933). In Ashe of Rings and Other Writings. Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co.,
ISBN0929701534 (p.358)
^"He [Hoban] also references Gothic writers who have influenced him, such as Margaret Oliphant and
Oliver Onions." Review of Her Name Was Lola by Russell Hoban. The Times, 8 November 2003, (p.14).
Further reading
D'Albertis, Deirdre (1997). "The Domestic Drone: Margaret Oliphant and a Political History of the Novel," SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 805–829.
Halsey, Francis W. (1899).
"Mrs. Oliphant,"The Book Buyer, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 111–113.
Hubbard, Tom (2011), "Margaret Oliphant's Beleagured City", in Hubbard, Tom (2022), Invitation to the Voyage, Scotland, Europe and Literature, Rymour, pp. 53 – 57,
ISBN9-781739-596002
Jay, Elisabeth (1995). Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself" – A Literary Life. Oxford University Press.
ISBN0198128754
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.
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.
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.
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.