Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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).
In 1890 George Bainton called her fiction spirited and dramatic, written with animation, force, and vivid painting of character.
Bainton, George, editor. The Art of Authorship. J. Clarke, 1890.
223
Notwithstanding her prolific output and popularity as a novelist, MA's work has passed into...
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
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...
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
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR's domestic realism bears comparison with other neglected chroniclers of the complexities of unsensational Victorian middle-class female lives such as Dinah Mulock Craik and Margaret Oliphant, and her revisions of classic fairy tales...
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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
Margery Allingham
This novel introduced the series detective Albert Campion, whose gentlemanly manner became MA's hallmark. In this novel he remains on the sidelines of the story as a privileged and apparently brainless young man who...
Textual Features
Ethel M. Arnold
EA’s strength as a writer was in her faculty for criticism. Some of the more prominent novels she reviewed for the Manchester Guardian include George Meredith’s The Amazing Marriage and Henry James’s...
Textual Production
Annie S. Swan
ASS published at Edinburgh a novel, Carlowrie; or, Among Lothian Folk, which was scathingly reviewed by Margaret Oliphant.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Swan, Annie S. My Life. Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1934.
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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, 1946.
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Textual Production
Marina Warner
MW published Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, her study of the legendary Maid of Orleans who became a fearless soldier, a martyr, and eventually a saint.
Warner's biography of Joan...
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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.
Cox, Michael, editor. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2002, 2 vols.
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979.
122
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.
qtd. in
Carson-Batchelor, Rhonda Lea. Margaret Oliphant: Gender, Identity, and Value in the Victorian Periodical Press. University of Alberta, 1998.
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, 1874–1987.
1970
Leavis, Q. D. Collected Essays. Editor Singh, G., Cambridge University Press, 1983–1989, 3 vols.
3: vii
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, 1998.
