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).
The Gentleman's Magazine's obituary for Bowles recalled that Chapters on Churchyardscontributed materially to establish her literary reputation and also showed powers of narrative fitting her for a popular and profitable branch of composition...
Literary responses
Sarah Grand
Margaret Oliphant
, reviewing the novel for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1889, described it as the expression of a great many thoughts of the moment, and of a desire which is stronger than it ever...
Literary responses
Eliza Lynn Linton
Before the second edition was out, in January 1873, ELL
wrote to Mark Rutherford
to thank him for his approval of this child of my deepest heart & faith. Her letter was offered for sale...
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
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.
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, 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
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Margaret Oliphant
, however, disparaged Aurora Floyd in Novels, her Blackwood's attack of September 1867 on the sensation novel, a school of which she took MEB
to be the leader. Recognising that the ignorant...
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.
Hardy, Thomas. “General Introduction”. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell, Clarendon Press, pp. 1-103.
16
Margaret Oliphant
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...
Colby, Vineta. The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century. New York University Press.
150
Sales were good, but there were some hostile reviews...
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
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
Elizabeth Sewell
Her autobiography has received the most recent critical attention of her writings. Critic Valerie Sanders
compares it with other autobiographies (by Harriet Martineau
, Fanny Kemble
and Margaret Oliphant
), and notes ES
's conflicted...
Literary responses
Mary Augusta Ward
Reviews were positive. Novelist Margaret Woods
felt that the archaic world it depicted was the root of Marcella's charm.
Watters, Tamie, and Mary Augusta Ward. “Introduction”. Marcella, Virago, p. vii - xvi.
xvi
Margaret Oliphant
criticised the author in Blackwood's for asking readers to surrender all our...
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
Julia Stretton
Charlotte Yonge
, writing in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign, published in 1897 by Margaret Oliphant
and others, grouped JS
with Lady Georgiana Fullerton
and Anne Manning
as similar in the purity and...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Oliphant, Margaret. The Marriage of Elinor. Macmillan, 1892.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Perpetual Curate. W. Blackwood, 1864.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Primrose Path: A Chapter in the Annals of the Kingdom of Fife. Hurst and Blackett, 1878.
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.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
Oliphant, Margaret. Zaidee: A Romance. Blackwood, 1856.
