Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Margaret Oliphant
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Standard Name: Oliphant, Margaret
Birth Name: Margaret Oliphant Wilson
Married Name: Margaret Oliphant Oliphant
Pseudonym: Mrs Margaret Maitland
Pseudonym: M. O. W. O.
Used Form: M. O. W. Oliphant
As the breadwinner for her constantly extending family, MO
was astonishingly productive. She published (sometimes by name, sometimes anonymously, often with no name but with allusion to her previous works) ninety-eight novels, and three times that many articles for Blackwood's and other magazines. She was equally prolific in short stories and in works of information: biography, socio-historical studies of cities, art criticism, historical sketches, literary histories, and a characteristic, fragmented autobiography, selective but nonetheless revealing. She also did translation and editing. She consistently foregrounds issues involved in Victorian expectations of womanhood: the relationships of daughter, sister, wife, and mother (especially the last).
Both men are treated with striking ambivalence (an ambivalence reminiscent of Margaret Oliphant
, whose work it is not certain that D'Arcy knew). Le Mesurier clearly behaved badly, but he truly loved Lily. Shergold aimed...
Textual Features
Mary Webb
Critics have called Dormer Old House itself the protagonist of this novel; its description fills the opening chapter. Like the country house in MW
's previous book, it takes a gothic colouring from the unhappiness...
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Annie S. Swan
This story takes place in a small town on the Scottish Borders at the time of the Napoleonic wars: the kind of setting that became a favourite with ASS
. In content, also, it is...
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Ella Hepworth Dixon
Here she combats the belief that modern women are rejecting marriage because they have so far unsexed themselves as to have lost the primordial instinct for conjugal life altogether. She points out the practical reasons...
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Margery Allingham
This novel introduced the series detective Albert Campion, whose gentlemanly manner became MA
's hallmark. In this novel he remains on the sidelines of the story as a privileged and apparently brainless young man who...
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Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
's domestic realism bears comparison with other neglected chroniclers of the complexities of unsensational Victorian middle-class female lives such as Dinah Mulock Craik
and Margaret Oliphant
, and her revisions of classic fairy tales...
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Marina Warner
MW
published Joan of Arc
: The Image of Female Heroism, her study of the legendary Maid of Orleans who became a fearless soldier, a martyr, and eventually a saint.
Warner's biography of Joan...
Textual Production
Annie S. Swan
ASS
published at Edinburgh a novel, Carlowrie; or, Among Lothian Folk, which was scathingly reviewed by Margaret Oliphant
.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Swan, Annie S. My Life. Ivor Nicholson and Watson.
Ouida
published her second novel, Strathmore: this work was mentioned by Margaret Oliphant
in her attack on the sensation noveltwo years later in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
