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
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
His article, Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon, which covered seven novels she had published since 1862, made a famous personal attack in asserting that her work evidenced familiarity with a very low type of female...
Literary responses Eliza Lynn Linton
In 1878, ELL wrote to a relative, True success comes only by hard work, great courage in self-correction, and the most earnest and intense determination to succeed, not thinking that every endeavour is already success...
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Informal and critical responses to The Doctor's Wife during its serialisation caused MEB to revise the conclusion. She admitted to Bulwer-Lytton in a letter dated 7 September 1864 that I am so apt to be...
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
They were in time to reap the full force of Margaret Oliphant 's disapproval in her anti-sensation-novel article in Blackwood's. She found it deeply shocking that leading literary journals were praising Rupert Godwin...
Literary responses Thomas Hardy
Early reviews were good, the Athenæum prophesying that Tess would rank high among the achievements of the Victorian novel, and the Pall Mall Gazette calling it the strongest English novel of many years.
qtd. in
Hardy, Thomas. “General Introduction”. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell, Clarendon Press, 1983, pp. 1-103.
16
Margaret Oliphant
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Margaret Oliphant 's critique of the sensation novel in 1867 relied heavily on attacking MEB 's reputation. The best she would say was that some of Braddon's works deserved some of their success. Braddon's sole...
Literary responses Anne Marsh
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes AM 's very high contemporary reputation. It cites the London Weekly Chronicle and Margaret Oliphant each hailing her, in her heyday, as a leader among women novelists (though...
Literary responses Rhoda Broughton
This novel had marked success, selling three thousand copies in the year of its publication.
Wood, Marilyn. Rhoda Broughton: Profile of a Novelist. Paul Watkins, 1993.
25
It was also widely reviewed. In her 1867 attack on the sensation novel, Margaret Oliphant acknowledged that Cometh Up...
Literary responses Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Geraldine Jewsbury in the Athenæum saw considerable promise in the book, but blamed it for verging on a treatment of incest which ought to be . . . inadmissable for a novel.
qtd. in
Shankman, Lillian F., and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. “Biographical Commentary and Notes”. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters, edited by Abigail Burnham Bloom et al., Ohio State University Press, 1994, p. various pages.
67
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
Margaret Oliphant
Literary responses Jean Ingelow
JI was wildly successful during her life—she even had a ship named after her while she lived—but it is only very recently that a resurgence of scholarship on and appreciation of her has begun. An...
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, 1954, p. 1: ix - lxxvii.
xiv
from her personal writings, and presented an icon of Victorian moral earnestness; many...
Literary responses Laura Riding
Scholar Michael Sadleir gave a lunch party to celebrate the publication, and was impressed by LR 's ability to make her ancient characters real.
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
295
He was agreeably surprised to learn that one of Riding's...
Literary responses Charlotte Yonge
During her lifetime CY was ranked as a serious novelist with Austen , Trollope , Balzac , and Zola . Contemporaries like Louisa Alcott , Margaret Oliphant , Ellen Wood , and Rhoda Broughton made...
Literary responses Geraldine Jewsbury
In Blackwood's in May 1855, Margaret Oliphant declared that we have seen few books so perfectly unsatisfactory as Constance Herbert.
qtd. in
Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin, 1935.
121
She criticized GJ for arranging her book around one woman's insanity, since the...

Timeline

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Texts

Oliphant, Margaret. The Greatest Heiress in England. Hurst and Blackett, 1879, 3 vols.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Ladies Lindores. Blackwood, 1883, 3 vols.
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.
Wilson, Robert, 1846 - 1893, and Margaret Oliphant. The Life and Times of Queen Victoria: With which is incorporated The Domestic Life of the Queen, by Mrs. Oliphant. Cassell, 1900, 4 vols.
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, 3 vols.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Makers of Florence: Dante, Giotto, Savonarola; and Their City. Macmillan, 1876.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Marriage of Elinor. Macmillan, 1892, 3 vols.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Perpetual Curate. W. Blackwood, 1864, 3 vols.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Primrose Path: A Chapter in the Annals of the Kingdom of Fife. Hurst and Blackett, 1878, 3 vols.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Rector and The Doctor’s Family. Garland, 1975.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Rector; and, The Doctor’s Family. W. Blackwood, 1863.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Victorian Age of English Literature. Dodd, Mead, 1892.
Oliphant, Margaret, and Francis Romano Oliphant. The Victorian Age of English Literature. Percival and Company, 1892, 2 vols.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
Oliphant, Margaret. Zaidee: A Romance. Blackwood, 1856, 3 vols.