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).
From her youth to her death JWC was a prolific letter-writer: more than three thousand of her letters survive.
Christianson, Aileen. “Jane Welsh Carlyle’s Private Writing Career”. A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, Edinburgh University Press, 1997, pp. 232-45.
232
Primary recipients of her correspondence included Thomas Carlyle, her mother Grace Welsh, her maternal...
Textual Production
Ouida
Ouida published her second novel, Strathmore: this work was mentioned by Margaret Oliphant in her attack on the sensation noveltwo years later in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
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.
1970 (29 July 1865): 142-3
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Geraldine Jewsbury
The success of woman novelists in the circulating libraries led many publishers to employ women readers.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton University Press, 1977.
156-7
GJ used her position with Richard Bentley and Son to promote women writers such as Margaret Oliphant and...
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Elizabeth Gaskell
The idea of self-improvement through writing and reading correlates to the strong emphasis in EG's fiction on education and the impact of environment. This was undoubtedly influenced by a Unitarian intellectual background indebted to...
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Ouida
Ouida published her novel Idalia (another of those mentioned by Margaret Oliphant in her attack on the sensation novel in September this year).
EC published the short work Joan the Maid, which precedes Margaret Oliphant's biography of Joan of Arc by seventeen years.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
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Anna Swanwick
She dedicated it to James Martineau in honour of their friendship of sixty years.
Swanwick, Anna. Poets the Interpreters of their Age. George Bell, 1892.
prelims
Her preface says: To the learned I have nothing to offer, but hopes to appeal to students and readers. She...
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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.
40
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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.
36
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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
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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...
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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
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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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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.
