Margaret Oliphant
de D. J. Trela
In her day, Margaret Oliphant was called the greatest living Scottish woman of letters. She was compared favorably to Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, held a leading position as reviewer for the venerable Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for nearly fifty years, and wrote an astonishing number of books and articles that were prodigious even by Victorian standards: ninety-eight novels, several dozen short stories, more than five hundred critical, biographical, or occasional articles, and several additional volumes of biography, history, and literary history. Her first novel, Passages in the Life of Mistress Margaret Maitland, published in 1849, was effusively praised by Lord Francis Jeffrey, the founding editor of the Edinburgh Review. Her posthumous collection of short stories, "A Widow's Tale," was introduced by her friend J. M. Barrie, who said no contemporary of hers had "a right to a stool near this woman." The young Robert Louis Stevenson claimed to have wept over the beauty of A Beleagured City. Carlyle admired her biography of Edward Irving; his wife treated her like a daughter and confided in her the romances of her youth. In between, she was praised as a novelist, feared as a critic, and respected by all as an important woman of letters. . Yet shortly after her death in 1897, most of her books went out of print and her reputation declined precipitously. Very little was published on her for over eighty years, with a modest re-evaluation of her life and oeuvre beginning in the last three decades. This is the first collection of essays ever devoted to Oliphant. It pays her the compliment of taking her seriously as an artist and seeks to evaluate her major works and beliefs rather than rely on misguided characterizations of her life and writing. It seeks to suggest future lines of research as it analyzes the best of her published work. This collection considers her unusually experimental Autobiography, her major works of fiction, which were often highly subversive of established literary practice or conventions, her highly misunderstood stand on the Woman Question, and basic themes of her literary criticism.
