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).
Head-and-shoulders chalk drawing of a youthful-looking Margaret Oliphant by Frederick Sandys, 1881. She is wearing a brocaded dress and a plain lace cap on her grey hair. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Annie Louisa Walker
ALW , as Mrs Harry Coghill finished arrang[ing] and edit[ing]The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant, which appeared in print by the following month.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Leavis, Q. D., and Margaret Oliphant. “Introduction”. Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. Margaret Oliphant, edited by Annie Louisa Walker and Annie Louisa Walker, Leicester University Press, pp. 9-34.
[35], xi
Textual Production Elizabeth Charles
EC published the short work Joan the Maid, which precedes Margaret Oliphant 's biography of Joan of Arc by seventeen years.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Textual Production Catherine Gore
CG became a regular contributor to Blackwood's, recruited, as Margaret Oliphant recorded, by Samuel Warren . Oliphant noted her quickness to learn the going rate of remuneration for her several light articles.
Carson-Batchelor, Rhonda Lea. Margaret Oliphant: Gender, Identity, and Value in the Victorian Periodical Press. University of Alberta.
204
The...
Textual Production Q. D. Leavis
QDL (a leading proponent of the significance of Margaret Oliphant's writing at a time when her status was low) contributed the introduction to a new edition of Oliphant 's formerly neglected novel Miss Marjoribanks, 1866.
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons.
1970
Leavis, Q. D. Collected Essays. Editor Singh, G., Cambridge University Press.
3: vii
Textual Production Blanche Warre Cornish
After the death of her friend Margaret Oliphant on 25 June 1897, BWC was so angered by a somewhat grudging appreciation that she countered with an eloquent and noble tribute.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. The Merry Wives of Westminster. Macmillan.
36
Textual Production Catherine Gore
Margaret Oliphant printed a good deal of CG 's professional correspondence in her Annals of a Publishing House, 1897.
Carson-Batchelor, Rhonda Lea. Margaret Oliphant: Gender, Identity, and Value in the Victorian Periodical Press. University of Alberta.
211-12
Textual Production Q. D. Leavis
QDL wrote the introduction to a new edition of Margaret Oliphant 's Autobiography and Letters, edited by Oliphant's cousin Annie Walker (Mrs Harry Coghill) and published by Leicester University Press .
Keating, Peter John. “A Pen under Pressure”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 3770, p. 616.
616
Leavis, Q. D. Collected Essays. Editor Singh, G., Cambridge University Press.
3: vii
Textual Production Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB , as the author of Lady Audley's Secret, re-issued in three volumes her penny-dreadful contribution Rupert Godwin—to the extreme disapproval of Margaret Oliphant , expressed in Blackwood's.
Oliphant, Margaret. “Novels”. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol.
102
, W. Blackwood, pp. 257-80.
261
Cox, Michael, editor. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press.
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
122
Textual Production Anne Thackeray Ritchie
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...
Textual Production 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...
Textual Production 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...
Textual Features Ella D'Arcy
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...
Textual Features 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...
Textual Features 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...

Timeline

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Texts

Oliphant, Margaret. Miss Marjoribanks. W. Blackwood, 1866.
Oliphant, Margaret. “Mrs. Craik”. Macmillan’s Magazine, Vol.
57
, No. November, pp. 81-5.
Oliphant, Margaret. “Novels”. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol.
94
, pp. 168-83.
Oliphant, Margaret. “Novels”. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol.
102
, W. Blackwood, pp. 257-80.
Oliphant, Margaret. Old Mr. Tredgold: A Story of Two Sisters. Longmans, Green, 1895.
Oliphant, Margaret. Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland, of Sunnyside. Colburn, 1849.
Oliphant, Margaret. Phoebe, Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford. Hurst and Blackett, 1876.
Macpherson, Gerardine. “Postscript”. Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson, edited by Margaret Oliphant, Longmans, Green, 1878.
Oliphant, Margaret. “Religious Memoirs”. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol.
83
, No. June, W. Blackwood, pp. 703-18.
Oliphant, Margaret. Salem Chapel. W. Blackwood, 1863.
Oliphant, Margaret. Sheridan. Macmillan, 1883.
Oliphant, Margaret. Sir Tom. Macmillan, 1884.
Oliphant, Margaret. Squire Arden. Hurst and Blackett, 1891.
Oliphant, Margaret. “The Anti-Marriage League”. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, No. 159, pp. 135-49.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Athelings; or, The Three Gifts. W. Blackwood, 1857.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant. Editor Walker, Annie Louisa, Blackwood, 1899.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Curate in Charge. Macmillan, 1876.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Days of My Life. An Autobiography. Hurst and Blackett, 1857.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Greatest Heiress in England. Hurst and Blackett, 1879.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Ladies Lindores. Blackwood, 1883.
Oliphant, Margaret. “The Laws Concerning Women”. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol.
79
, W. Blackwood, pp. 379-87.
Oliphant, Margaret. “The Life and Letters of George Eliot”. Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, edited by Gail Marshall et al., Pickering and Chatto, 2003, pp. 1: 139 - 80.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Life of Edward Irving. Blackwood, 1862.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Macmillan, 1882.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Makers of Florence: Dante, Giotto, Savonarola; and Their City. Macmillan, 1876.