emma_in_dream

Mrs Oliphaunt wrote a huge number of novels – she churned out too many to be classed as a ‘great’ novelist. But she also has her moments.

*Phoebe* was the last of her Carlingford novels, which, like Trollope’s contemporary series, tracked life in the middle classes in small towns. The plot is essentially romantic – who will Phoebe marry? Either the young man with a sinecure who loves her but will never amount to much, or the dim witted, enormously rich youth who she can shape for greatness. She decides on the one she can shape, who will be, as she says ‘a career’ for her.

He was not very wise, nor a man to be enthusiastic about, but he would be a career to Phoebe. She did not think of it humbly like this, but with a big capital--a Career. Yes; she could put him into parliament, and keep him there. She could thrust him forward (she believed) to the front of affairs. He would be as good as a profession, a position, a great work to Phoebe. He meant wealth (which she dismissed in its superficial aspect as something meaningless and vulgar, but accepted in its higher aspect as an almost necessary condition of influence), and he meant all the possibilities of future power. Who can say that she was not as romantic as any girl of twenty could be? only her romance took an unusual form. It was her head that was full of throbbings and pulses, not her heart.


Oliphaunt was sometimes accused of heartlessness, but my sympathies are with Phoebe. The only career open to her is marriage and yet it provides a limited scope to a girl of her abilities. Marrying money will allow her to push her husband into the parliamentary career that Phoebe is so suited to. As the novel writes…..

And Clarence got into Parliament, and the reader, perhaps (if Parliament is sitting), may have had the luck to read a speech in the morning paper of Phoebe's composition, and if he ever got the secret of her style would know it again, and might trace the course of a public character for years to come by that means. But this secret is one which no bribe nor worldly inducement will ever tempt our lips to betray.


There is a sub-plot where a Minister embezzles a small amount of money, but the entire matter is capably dealt with by Phoebe. There is, though, a great deal of careful observation in Oliphaunt’s description of the temptations of money.

A momentary disappointment when he saw how little James's draft was--then a sense of that semi-intoxication which comes upon a poor man when a sum of money falls into his hands--gradually invaded his soul.


Oliphaunt herself spent her life always in debt, writing to pay off money already spent, so she was well aware of the allure of money.

Mrs Oliphant was recommended to me as a writer similar to Austen, writing in the mid-nineteenth century. This is certainly a fair description and I am *amazed* that Oliphant is not better known.*


I’m not saying she is as good as Austen (which would be a big call). However, she certainly shares two of the characteristics I like most in Austen: the mastery of irony and the tight focus on the social life of a small group of people. This is such a line to walk – to say that what is really important is the happiness and quotidienne life of a group of middle class people and to simultaneously stand back and laugh at the same people. What a triumph.


The story is about Miss Majoribanks, who is constantly likened to a general, a Napoleonic hero, a genius who shapes the social life of Highbury... I mean Carlingford. Miss Majoribanks returns to the village after the death of her mother and, despite her father’s efforts, revolutionises local social life so she can be ‘a comfort to dear Papa’. She organizes those around her, avoids marriage with the social climber, and in the end manages to triumph even over the death of her Papa which leaves her penniless – by marrying her cousin and moving into a manor house with the prospect of running the local village.


Oliphant is not as romantic as Austen. There are no obvious couples circling each other. And the outlook is perhaps slightly less optimistic – which would be the difference between writing in the genre of romance (where the happy ending is part of the definition of the genre) and family novel (where there is no such guarantee).


So why is Oliphant not better known? Perhaps this is because she was crazily over-productive and so pumped out lots of bad work as well as good. Ninety eight novels, people, plus non-fiction, literary criticism, travel guides, biographies and short stories over the course of decades. She wrote her first novel while nursing her mother on her death bed, literally writing in the room. Not until she was in her 30s did she write in solitude.


She continued writing, without pause, to support her family and her extended family. Her husband was an ineffectual stained glass window designer who died of consumption, leaving her with three children. Three more had died in infancy. Her daughter died, so she moved to Winchester so the boys could go to Eton. She also supported her alcoholic brother, her two orphaned nieces and a cousin. Her boys grew up and meandered about, having no careers and earning no money, before both dying early. After all her sacrifices to her children, she outlived them all.


An 1883 critic wrote: ‘While I cheerfully recognize that the imaginative force of Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot is in certain respects inimitable, I am often inclined to maintain that Mrs Oliphant is the most remarkable woman of her time…. Each of these great romance writers concentrated all her faculties for months (I might say years) upon a single work. Mrs Oliphant has never had the leisure for this absorbing devotion, this almost fierce concentration… Had Mrs Oliphant concentrated her powers, what might she not have done?’


She was at the centre of nineteenth-century literary circles. She was a friend of successive generations of the Blackwoods who edited the influential Blackwood Review. She was intimate with Anne Thackeray Ritchie and with the Carlyles. In later years she was befriended by JM Barrie; reviewed Henry James; attacked Thomas Hardy; thought Leslie Stephens (father of Virginia Woolf) had only got to edit the Dictionary of National Biography because of his connections and because he was a man.


Decades later Virginia Woolf had a violent response to Mrs Oliphant who she viewed as a hack who compromised her integrity for sales, necessitated by having to support her children.** ‘Has [reading her work] smeared your mind and led you to deplore the fact that Mrs Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children? Inevitably, considering the damage that poverty inflicts on the mind and body, the necessity that is laid upon those who have children to see that they are fed and clothed, nursed and educated, we have to applaud her choice and admire her courage. But if we applaud the choice and admire the courage of those who do what she did, we can spare ourselves the trouble of addressing our appeal to them, for they will be no more able to protect disinterested culture and intellectual liberty than she.’


Woolf argued so passionately for a room of one’s own, with Oliphant representing the very opposite of that. (In a quite literal sense – she wrote in sick rooms, nurseries, drawing rooms). And even in the nineteenth century critics recognised that her talents had been squandered by the need to support her children. In a review of her autobiography, published after her death, she was described as a better writer than Trollope. The reviewer asked: ‘Why with all these advantages does she get no further? What is it that sets the dividing line between her and George Eliot or Charlotte Bronte?’ He concluded: ‘It may be an accident – but more likely it is not – that the women who have been great artist have been childless women.’


Another critic wrote that ‘for [her children] she abandoned the hope – or as we believe, and as she believed – the certainty of being a great authoress on a level with George Eliot, and deliberately reduced herself, as she thought, to a manufacturer of saleable literature.’


She was indeed a remarkable woman if contemplating her life led the reviewers to make the first tentative steps towards defining traditional femininity and especially motherhood as problematic. It is a long journey from here to the twenty first century, and yet… so much in her life is still unresolved today.

I will leave you with another quote, this one from Margaret Forster, writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995. ‘She is the perfect example of that well-known literary puzzle, the writer highly rated and immensely successful in their own time who becomes relegated by posterity to a position only just above obscurity. ...of Mrs Oliphant's ninety-eight novels modern readers will be unusual if they have read two or three. Fewer still will be acquainted with any of her twenty-five works of non-fiction...
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 through her own labours, without neglecting them one iota. She should, perhaps, become the patron saint of all harassed women writers with demanding families.’



PS: I desperately want someone to read some of her stuff so I can discuss it with a friend.










• QD Leavis called Miss Majoribanks the stepping stone between Emma and Middlemarch.


• Woolf may also have had a personal response to Oliphant as Oliphant was friends with Anne Thackeray Ritchie who was Viriginia Woolf’s aunt. Leslie Stephenson wrote about Mrs Oliphant in the Mausoleum Book 1895 which described his first wife in hagiographical terms.