Margaret Oliphant
Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (1828-97) was in many ways a trailblazer and a model for later Scotswomen who hoped to make their mark as writers. She was born in Wallyford, East Lothian, and spent most of her childhood in Glasgow and Liverpool. She had two brothers, neither of whom was nearly as competent or practical as she was. As a young woman, she spent three months in London monitoring the alcohol consumption of Willie, who was educated as a Presbyterian minister and who eventually succumbed to alcoholism, and much later in life, she took in the children of her eldest brother, Frank, educating them as if they were her own.
The Great Disruption of 1843 was a formative experience in Oliphant’s youth, and her family sided with those who broke away to form the Free Presbyterian Church. The Disruption features significantly in her first published novel, Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland (1849), which examined its effects on an extended family in small-town Scotland.
Oliphant embarked on a career as a writer and on married life almost simultaneously. In 1852, she married her cousin, also called Frank, a painter and stained-glass artist. Her writing sustained the household, as Frank’s artistic idealism and poor health rendered his income uncertain. At the same time, her first serialized novel Katie Stewart appeared in the prestigious Blackwood’s Magazine, which quickly led to opportunities for writing review essays for the periodical. Between 1853 and 1856, she gave birth to four children, two of whom survived infancy. In 1859, Oliphant packed up the household and set off for Italy in hopes of restoring Frank’s health. Unbeknownst to her, Frank had already learned from his physician that his recovery was impossible. He died in Rome, after which Oliphant gave birth to a son before returning home.
After several frustrating months in which Oliphant despaired of ever again writing anything that would satisfy William and John Blackwood, she began a story that would become the first of The Chronicles of Carlingford, her most lucrative and popular novels. The ‘60s were a period of relative prosperity for Oliphant, as she wrote a number of biographies and established a wider network of literary connections. After her daughter’s sudden death in 1864, she settled in Windsor so that her sons could attend Eton as day pupils. As Oliphant’s income, never entirely predictable, increased, so did her responsibility, as her household absorbed her insolvent elder brother Frank and his children. She wrote incessantly to make ends meet, always in fear of undercutting sales of her own work by publishing too much.
In the 1880s, as literary tastes changed, Oliphant could command less money for her work than she had done previously. At the same time, her lackadaisical sons seemed incapable of supporting themselves. So she continued to write at a prodigious rate, prodigious 98 novels, 50 short stories, and countless review essays by the time of her death. She saw all of her children pre-decease her, and in the end, work was all that remained for her.
Oliphant’s unpretentious, matter-of-fact attitude towards her work as a writer seems to have appealed to the Scotswomen who followed in her footsteps. She strove to reconcile her trade as a writer with her duties as a mother at a time when middle-class ideals of femininity prevented women from working for money. And she struggled tenaciously but ultimately unsuccessfully for a secure foothold in the male-dominated publishing world. Her accomplishments under these circumstances are remarkable.
Bibliography
Deirdre D’Albertis, “The Domestic Drone: Margaret Oliphant and a Political History of the Novel,” SEL, 37 (1997), pp. 805-829.
Vineta Colby and Robert A. Colby, The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and the Victorian Literary Marketplace (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966).
Elisabeth Jay, Mrs. Oliphant: ‘A Fiction to Herself.’ A Literary Life (Oxford: Claredon, 1995).
Elsie B. Michie, The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011).
Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Valerie Sanders, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996).
Helen Sutherland, “Margaret Oliphant and the Periodical Press,” The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing (Edinburgh: EUP, 2012), 84-93.
D.J. Rela, ed. Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1995).
Merryn Williams, Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography (London: Macmillan, 1986).
Books
Links to Oliphant’s novels and short stories can be found at The Margaret Oliphant Fiction Collection.
Archive
View Margaret Oliphant’s work in our archive.