OLIPHANT: The Collected Writings of Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897)

Part 1

"Mrs Oliphant is valuable not only for the integrity of her stories and the grace and fluency with which she tells them, but for the unusual prominence she gives to domestic lives and female friendships. She was a thoroughly professional writer who supported her family entirely though her own labours, without neglecting them one iota. She should, perhaps, become the patron saint of all harassed women writers with demanding families."
Margaret Forster writing in the TLS, 10 March 1995

"The reason for studying Margaret Oliphant’s life and work is simply that she was a great writer, who has been neglected for far too long."
Merryn Williams writing in Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography (Macmillan, 1986)

Margaret Oliphant was one of the great figures of Victorian literature. More prolific than Trollope, she was read eagerly by Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin and W E Gladstone, and Dickens paid her £1000 for the serialisation rights to one of her books (Madonna Mary).

Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine declared that she "belonged to the race of literary giants.... Mrs Oliphant has been to the England of letters what the Queen has been to our society as a whole."

Yet, after her death in 1897, her reputation went into a steep decline. Perhaps it was because she was too closely identified with the Victorian Age. Perhaps it was the result of posthumous criticism by Thomas Hardy, whom she had sharply criticised when he was a young writer.

There is now a strong movement to return Oliphant to the pantheon of literature. It is correspondence fuelled by the realisation that she did write refreshingly realistic and non-sentimental novels depicting the struggles of women, the problems of marriage and and gender and the difficulties of parent-child relationships. Works such as The rector and the doctor’s family, Salem Chapel, Mrs Marjoribanks, A Beleaguered City, Kirsteen, and Diana Trelawny, merit a place in any list of great 19th century novels.

We now make it possible to undertake a thorough assessment of her life and work by making available both the major collection of her surviving manuscripts and a complete collection of first editions of her works.

Margaret Oliphant wrote 98 novels and 26 histories, biographies and critical works during her lifetime. All of these are now published here.

Part 1 covers 29 titles in 62 volumes, starting with her two earliest works, Passages in the Life of Mary Maitland (1849) and Caleb Field: a tale of the Puritans (1851). Also featured are The Rector, and the Doctor’s Family and Salem Chapel, which both appeared anonymously in 1863. Many attributed them to George Eliot. These launched the highly successful Chronicles of Carlingford. A widow’s tale (1898) has an introduction by J M Barrie, who was a great admirer of her writing.