Margaret Oliphant

04 April 1828 - 25 June 1897

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).

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Connections

Connections	Author name Sort descending	Excerpt
Textual Production	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...
Family and Intimate relationships	Thomas Carlyle	Following TC 's death, James Anthony Froude published Reminiscences of Carlyle, which presented an unfavourable picture of the Carlyles' marriage. This angered their friend Margaret Oliphant , and she responded with an essay providing...
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.
Friends, Associates	Blanche Warre Cornish	BWC was a friend of Margaret Oliphant , and later of Maurice Baring (as were her children). Her tea-table was frequented by minor literary men like Oscar Browning and Joseph Henry Shorthouse , while Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
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
Friends, Associates	Dinah Mulock Craik	Their circle of friends included the critic and historian George Lillie Craik , Camilla Toulmin , John Westland Marston , Alexander Macmillan (the publisher), Charles Edward Mudie (founder of Mudie's Lending Library ), and the...
Publishing	Dinah Mulock Craik	Her novels were rapidly reprinted in inexpensive editions in Britain and in the United States, indicating that she was gaining a substantial audience. Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Twayne. 36-7 She attempted unsuccessfully to get better terms from her publisher,...
Reception	Dinah Mulock Craik	The book was immediately successful in England and the United States. Kaplan, Cora, and Dinah Mulock Craik. “Introduction”. Olive; and, The Half-Caste, Oxford University Press, p. ix - xxv. xi Sally Mitchell remarks that it produced a huge expansion in the audience for fiction: The book helped to overcome the resistance to fiction...
Reception	Dinah Mulock Craik	Following her death, a committee which included Tennyson , Arnold , Robert Browning , Margaret Oliphant , T. H. Huxley , and James Russell Lowell was formed to devise a memorial to DMC in Tewkesbury...
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...
Occupation	Dante Alighieri	Dante's known poetry begins with La vita nuova (The New Life in English), a work in both verse and prose about his famous love for the married Beatrice, which was probably finished by 1293...
Textual Production	Emily Davies	Under ED 's editorship, the periodical combined literary contributions (such as poetry by Christina Rossetti and fiction by Thomas Adolphus Trollope ) with book reviews, reports of bodies such as the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women
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...
Literary responses	Ménie Muriel Dowie	Reviews, however, though mixed, were not entirely unfavourable. Though many attacked the novel because of the audacity of the topics it tackled—Margaret Oliphant 's The Anti-Marriage League was a notable negative review—several that appeared...
Literary responses	George Eliot	Cross , concerned to protect and dignify her, chose the more sententious passages and excluded the spontaneous, trivial, and humorous remarks Eliot, George. “Preface”. The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon S. Haight, Yale University Press, p. 1: ix - lxxvii. xiv from her personal writings, and presented an icon of Victorian moral earnestness; many...

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Texts

Oliphant, Margaret. Miss Marjoribanks. W. Blackwood, 1866.

Oliphant, Margaret. “Mrs. Craik”. Macmillan’s Magazine, Vol.

, No. November, pp. 81-5.

Oliphant, Margaret. “Novels”. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol.

, 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.

, 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.

, 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.