Oliphant, Margaret (1828–1897)

British novelist and biographer. Name variations: Mrs. Oliphant; Margaret Oliphant Wilson. Born Margaret Oliphant Wilson on April 4, 1828, in Wallyford, Scotland; died on June 25, 1897, in Windsor, Berkshire, England; daughter of Francis Wilson (a minor customs official) and Margaret (Oliphant) Wilson; married her cousin Francis Oliphant (an artist), in 1852 (died 1859); children: Maggie (died 1864); Cyril; Frank; two who died in infancy.

Selected writings:

Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland (1849); Caleb Field: A Tale of the Puritans (1851); Katie Stewart (1852); Memoirs and Resolutions of Adam Graeme of Mossgray (1852); The Quiet Heart: A Story (1854); The Athelings (1857); The Days of My Life: An Autobiography (1857); Orphans: A Chapter in Life (1858); Life of Edward Irving (1862); Salem Chapel (1863); The Perpetual Curate (1864); Miss Marjoribanks (1866); The Minister's Wife (1869); Squire Arden (1871); May (1873); Whiteladies (1874); Phoebe Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford (1876); The Greatest Heiress in England (1879); The Fugitives: A Story (1879); He That Will Not when He May (1880); Literary History of England (1882); Hester (1883); The Ladies Lindores (1883); Stories of the Seen and Unseen (1885); A House Divided Against Itself (1886); Kirsteen (1890); Jerusalem: Its History and Hope (1891); The Marriage of Elinor (1892); The Victorian Age of English Literature (1892); The Cuckoo in the Nest (1892); A House in Bloomsbury (1894); Sir Robert's Fortune (1895); The Ways of Life: Two Stories (1897); Annals of a Publishing House (1897–98); Autobiography and Letters (1899); Queen Victoria: A Personal Sketch (1901).

Margaret Oliphant was a prolific writer who over the span of some 50 years authored more than 100 novels, numerous travel books, histories, and biographies, over 50 short stories, and at least 400 periodical essays. While she enjoyed the distinction of being Queen Victoria 's favorite novelist, Oliphant struggled to maintain a writing pace that would generate the income needed to support a number of dependent relatives. The necessity of speed and the whims of her audience kept her work from maintaining the quality needed for an enduring literary reputation, and by the end of the 19th century she was all but forgotten. Although her industry ultimately led to her obscurity, as one critic noted, "The really surprising thing is not that she produced a great deal of hack-work, but that so much is so good."

The last child of Francis and Margaret Oliphant Wilson , Margaret Oliphant was born in Scotland on April 4, 1828. Though there is no record of a formal education, the young girl inherited a love of learning from her mother. She began writing in her teens (efforts which she claimed her family treated with gentle mockery rather than with support), and at age 21 published her first novel, Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland (1849).

With the serial publication of her novel Katie Stewart in 1852, Oliphant began a long association with Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Perhaps the single most influential literary and political journal in the British Empire in the 1820s and 1830s, Blackwood's was known for "tales of terror," and remained an important publication throughout the Victorian Age. Oliphant would go on to publish numerous travel pieces, historical evaluations, literary reviews and short fiction in the magazine. Also in 1852 she married Francis Wilson Oliphant, an artist who was her cousin, and moved to London with him. There he established a stained glass studio, and she gave birth to four children, two of whom died in infancy. Her husband's tuberculosis caused the family to move to Rome in 1859, but the warmer Italian climate failed to halt the progress of the disease, and he died later that year. Pregnant, heavily in debt, and alone with her children in a foreign country, Oliphant was in dire straits, and a bout of writer's block exacerbated her financial and emotional strain. She returned to Britain with her children, eventually settling in Ealing.

Out of her sorrow came Oliphant's most successful series, The Chronicles of Carlingford. Published in Blackwood's between 1861 and 1876, and subsequently in novel form as Salem Chapel (1863), The Perpetual Curate (1864), Miss Marjoribanks (1866), and Phoebe Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford (1876), the series focused on the intertwined relationships of English Dissenters in a small town. Narrower in scope than Anthony Trollope's 'Barsetshire' novels, after which the books were modeled, Oliphant's work focused an ironic but not unkind gaze on church politics and questions of doctrine and vocation. At the time of their anonymous publication, the novels were thought by many to have come from the pen of George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans ). In addition to establishing her reputation, the Chronicles set a precedent that would be repeated throughout Oliphant's life, in which she produced her best work during her times of greatest sadness.

Tragedy continued to haunt her. While on a tour of Italy in 1864, her 11-year-old daughter Maggie died of gastric fever in Rome. Oliphant wrote feverishly to provide money for a sound education for her two sons, and settled in Windsor, England, so that they could attend Eton. However, her ever-growing household hindered her attempts to earn enough money to support her surviving children. When her brother Frank's business collapsed in 1868, his son joined her household. Two years later Frank's wife died, and he and his two daughters also moved in. A distant cousin, Annie Walker , likewise took refuge with the family as a penniless orphan. In addition to all these people, Oliphant supported her alcoholic brother Willie, who had lost his position as a Presbyterian minister and was living in Rome.

With so many people dependent on her, Oliphant turned out books at an astonishing rate. She wrote full-length novels while also producing a regular stream of articles for Blackwood's, as well as a number of biographies. Her Life of Edward Irving (1862) was particularly praised, and was followed by biographies of John Tulloch (1888), Laurence Oliphant (who was no relation, 1891), and Thomas Chalmers (1893). In 1882, she wrote a Literary History of England, and ten years later, with her son Frank, wrote The Victorian Age of English Literature.

Oliphant's novels largely consisted of popular romances involving unhappy marriages. The Athelings (1857), a huge success, was considered the best of her domestic romances. Other noted titles were The Greatest Heiress in England (1879), Hester (1883), The Ladies Lindores (1883), Kirsteen (1890), and Sir Robert's Fortune (1895). Victorian novels routinely were published in three volumes, however, and as Oliphant's plots often petered out before she adequately filled the requisite three volumes, many of her longer works suffer from extraneous padding. The contrast between her novels and the tighter writing of her short fiction heightens critical appreciation of her short stories, many of which focus on individual relationships rather than a large social panorama. She also made important contributions to the supernatural genre, which were among Blackwood's stock-in-trade. Unlike the typical Victorian thrillers, Oliphant's "tales of the seen and unseen" (which was also the title of one of her story collections) were generally explorations of the unknown as it relates to the living, rather than attempts to terrorize the reader. Several of her stories portray the spirit realm with genuine sympathy, and in an era when disease and childbirth regularly claimed victims from all classes, her audience appreciated the comforting thought that departed loved ones might be close by. Her story "The Open Door" is claimed by some as one of the best ghost stories ever written, and remains frequently anthologized, as do her "The Library Window" and "The Secret Chamber." The last important writing she did in the final years of her life was also a short story, published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1893. An exploration of contemporary assumptions that young widows who did not, as expected, withdraw from society must in consequence be sexually permissive, "The Widow's Tale" concerns a woman who enters into a loveless second marriage. Her new husband spends her small inheritance and does not permit her children to live with them. Some have speculated that the story explains why the author never married a second time.

Although some of Oliphant's essays indicate that she did not support the notion of women's rights, the female characters she wrote were often far from the Victorian ideal of submissive and nurturing wife and mother. Many, like Oliphant herself, were strong women forced to support weak men, in some cases by taking employment outside the home; biographers have traced this recurring theme to her disappointment with the men in her own life. In addition to her economically crippled brothers, Oliphant's sons failed to make a way for themselves, despite her sacrificial arrangements for their first-rate education. Oliphant blamed her indulgence of them for their failures. She was equally hard on herself in regards to her writing, noting in her autobiography (despite the earlier speculation about The Chronicles of Carlingford) that she would never be mentioned in the same breath with George Eliot. She stated flatly that "to bring up the boys for the service of God was better than to write a fine novel, supposing even that it was in me to do so."

The death of her son Cyril in 1890 began the "ebb tide," as she called it, of Oliphant's life. Her health began to decline, and the death of Frank, her last surviving child, in 1894 was a further blow. Her final project was a history of the Blackwood publishing house, which remained unfinished at the time of her death in 1897 at her home in Windsor, England. It was published posthumously, as was her Autobiography and Letters, in 1899.

sources:

Buck, Claire, ed. The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. NY: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Fisk, Mary Lou, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 159. British Short-Fiction Writers, 1800–1880. Edited by John R. Greenfield. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1996.

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds. British Authors of the Nineteenth Century. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1936.

Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Uglow, Jennifer S., comp. and ed. The International Dictionary of Women's Biography. NY: Continuum, 1985.

Winnifrith, Tom. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 18. Victorian Novelists After 1885. Edited by Ira B. Nadel and William E. Fredeman. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1983.

Jacqueline Mitchell , freelance writer, Detroit, Michigan