Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Margaret Oliphant
-
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).
She followed it up in in her address of 10 January 1913 as President of the English Association
, published in pamphlet form as A Discourse on Modern Sibyls, as well as in From...
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Dorothy L. Sayers
Between 1928 and 1934, DLS
edited three volumes under the series title Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. Her introductions to these collections offered a scholarly history of the genre of detective...
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Marie Belloc Lowndes
MBL
decided in her teens that she wanted to be a writer. In 1887, with the encouragement of her mother
(who was based in France) the two of them embarked on a winter in the...
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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...
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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.
JP
's Plantagenet saga, a series of fictionalized biographies, began with The Plantagenet Prelude, about the lives of Henry II
and his consort Eleanor of Aquitaine
.
Eleanor was another compelling historical figure, already...
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Geraldine Jewsbury
The success of woman novelists in the circulating libraries led many publishers to employ women readers.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton University Press.
156-7
GJ
used her position with Richard Bentley and Son
to promote women writers such as Margaret Oliphant
and...
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Jane Welsh Carlyle
From her youth to her death JWC
was a prolific letter-writer: more than three thousand of her letters survive.
Christianson, Aileen. “Jane Welsh Carlyle’s Private Writing Career”. A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 232-45.
232
Primary recipients of her correspondence included Thomas Carlyle, her mother Grace Welsh
, her maternal...
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Elizabeth Gaskell
The idea of self-improvement through writing and reading correlates to the strong emphasis in EG
's fiction on education and the impact of environment. This was undoubtedly influenced by a Unitarian intellectual background indebted to...
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Eunice Guthrie Murray
Her subjects here include such comparatively well-known authors as Joanna Baillie
, Anne Grant
, and Margaret Oliphant
, and also the almost unknown diarist and novelist Margaret Calderwood
.
