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).
Within a few years of her first novel's publication, Ouida
had attained some celebrity as a writer, but not all the attention she received was positive. While her sales were strong, she was attacked for...
Textual Production
Jean Plaidy
JP
's Plantagenet saga, a series of fictionalized biographies, began with The Plantagenet Prelude, about the lives of Henry II
and his consort Eleanor of Aquitaine
.
Eleanor was another compelling historical figure, already...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Rigby
Although she grew increasingly frail, ER
continued writing throughout her last years. In January 1889 (her eightieth year) she published in the Quarterly Review another anonymous piece on Italy, Venice: Her Institutions and Private...
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...
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
Textual Production
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
She followed it up in in her address of 10 January 1913 as President of the English Association
, published in pamphlet form as A Discourse on Modern Sibyls, as well as in From...
Friends, Associates
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
lived with the Stephens
after their marriage, and while there became a friend of such literary figures as George Meredith
, Henry James
(who described her after an early encounter as exquisitely irrational)...
Travel
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
In summer 1875, ATR
joined Minny
and Leslie Stephen in Switzerland, where they travelled with Margaret Oliphant
(who became a friend of ATR
).
Gérin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography. Oxford University Press.
164
Friends, Associates
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
wrote to Charlotte Yonge
a few years later, lamenting: oh! what a pity it is that we are all growing old who have had such happy happy times with one another.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters. Editors Bloom, Abigail Burnham and John Maynard, Ohio State University Press.
242
She uttered...
Textual Production
Dorothy L. Sayers
Between 1928 and 1934, DLS
edited three volumes under the series title Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. Her introductions to these collections offered a scholarly history of the genre of detective...
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
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...
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. 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.
