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).
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 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
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
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...
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...
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...
Textual Production
Jane Welsh Carlyle
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...
Textual Production
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...
