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Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) was born in Wallyford, near Edinburgh.
Her
father was a clerk, and growing up she lived in Glasgow and Liverpool.
Her mother was keen that her daughter should be well read and so Oliphant
was given a superior education to many of her sex. Her first novel,
Passages in the Life of Margaret Maitland (1849), achieved some
success and was followed two years later with further novels. She began
contributing to magazines including Blackwoods, for whom she was to write
hundreds of short stories, essays, articles and serialised novels such as
Katie Stewart (1853). She often contributed several pieces for a
single edition and so many of these works were anonymous.
By 1857, Oliphant married her cousin Frank Wilson Oliphant,
an artist, but
he was to die seven years later from tuberculosis. This left Oliphant as the
breadwinner with three young children and a pile of debts. In addition to
these burdens, she later supported her alcoholic brother, Willie, and the three
children of her other brother, Frank.
In the 19th century there were few career options for women.
Oliphant
produced over a hundred novels in her lifetime, many of them three volumes
in length, which provided for her family's needs. An extremely prolific
writer, her novels and short-stories make her one of the most
important writers of Victorian fiction, but Oliphant has suffered for having
produced too much. She wrote continuously out of financial necessity,
but it has been to the detriment of her critical reputation.
Her fiction was supplemented by critical works such as A
Literary History
of Scotland (1882), studies on Francis of Assisi (1868), Thomas Chalmers
the Scottish preacher and philosopher (1893), travel writing on Florence,
Jerusalem and many other studies of people and places. Although she only
lived for short periods in Scotland, much of her writing is set in Scotland
or shows a concern with Scottish themes, and her writing displays strong
connections with the Scots oral tradition. Katie Stewart, the historical
Jacobean novel, is thought to be based on Oliphant's own family
background.
Much of her later work is concerned with the injustice faced
by women and is
a significant criticism of the social values of the nineteenth century.
Kirsteen (1890) also fits into this category.
Some of Oliphant's most powerful stories are her supernatural
tales,
compiled in A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and Unseen
(1885). These resonate with Oliphant's personal fascination in what
happens to us after we die. The child mortality rate was high in Victorian
times and having lost a young child herself, and indeed outliving her two
other children, who died as young adults, these tales offer a sense of comfort
to those left behind. She was a believing Christian but not an unquestioning
one, and her faith did not provide her with easy consolation.
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