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 Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
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...
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	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	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. 25 It was also widely reviewed. In her 1867 attack on the sensation novel, Margaret Oliphant acknowledged that Cometh Up...
Literary responses	Ellen Wood	Within a few years EW 's popularity had decidedly waned. Margaret Oliphant in The Victorian Age of English Literature found nothing to say about Wood beyond that fact that her works sold by the fifty...
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	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. Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin. 121 She criticized GJ for arranging her book around one woman's insanity, since the...
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...
Literary responses	Geraldine Jewsbury	Despite GJ 's reputation among her contemporaries as a major influence on Victorian literature, her contributions as author and critic have faded into obscurity. Late in the period, Margaret Oliphant passed her over in The...
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. 295 He was agreeably surprised to learn that one of Riding's...

Timeline

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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.