emma_in_dream

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.

Let me tell you how I came to *Aurora Leigh* (1856).

I read Joanna Russ’ rebuttal of Virginia Woolf’s analysis of EBB’s *Aurora Leigh*. Of course they would all be interested in *Aurora Leigh*. It is a lengthy narrative poem about the difficulties in being a woman writing.

Aurora Leigh, the narrator, was raised by her bookish father in Italy, then orphaned and lived with her cold aunt in England. She was close to her cousin Romney Leigh but he rejected her poetry without bothering to read it.

That book of yours,

I have not read a page of; but I toss

A rose up–it falls calyx down, you see! . . 

The chances are that, being a woman, young,

And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, . . 

You write as well . . and ill . . upon the whole,

As other women. If as well, what then?

If even a little better, . . still what then?

We want the Best in art now, or no art.


Romney proposes but really wants a helpmeet to assist him in his social causes. Aurora refuses him. After her aunt’s death, Aurora goes off and becomes a professional writer. There’s some voice of experience stuff about how many different forms of writing she has to undertake to support herself.

Romney tries to marry a pauper and then a mean wealthy woman, and it doesn’t work out. And then he marries Aurora after he realizes he does love her.

They are to combine art, love and work for social causes. Specifically, she espouses a kind of contemporary poetry, not one set in a romantic past, but one which grapples with contemporary issues.

Beloved, let us love so well, 

Our work shall still be better for our love, 

And still our love be sweeter for our work, 

And both, commended, for the sake of each, 

By all true workers and true lovers, born.

The poem is one long meditation (like 11,000 words of blank verse)* on what it means to dedicate yourself to art, what it means to love, whether marriage and art are compatible, how female artists are treated, whether poetry should be contemporary, urgent and radical (her answer to that one was a resounding yes).

Of course this theme preoccupied EBB who wrote despite being effectively locked in a tower for twenty years by her father; of course it was central to Virginia Woolf’ life, a woman who didn’t even have what education a governess could supply and who nonetheless became a great novelist; of course Joanna Russ wanted to talk about it in *How to Suppress Women’s Writing*. It is really a privilege to hear three such intellects in conversation.

I don’t have much to add to the conversation beyond highlighting this passage.

We get no good

By being ungenerous, even to a book,

And calculating profits . . so much help

By so much rending. It is rather when

We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge

Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,

Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth–
'
Tis then we get the right good from a book.

So, EBB, Virginia Woolf, Joanna Russ – all in one long conversation.**



And some extra stuff:

Also, I was struck by some of the topical allusions. Potatoes – will they cease to exist with the potato famine?

And are potatoes to grow mythical

Like moly? will the apple die out too?

Mastadons – apparently on EBB’s mind.

Books, books, books!

I had found the secret of a garret-room

Piled high with cases in my father's name;

Piled high, packed large,–where, creeping in and out

Among the giant fossils of my past,

Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs

Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there

At this or that box, pulling through the gap,

In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,

The first book first.

And I like her description of a baby:

There he lay, upon his back,

The yearling creature, warm and moist with life

To the bottom of his dimples,–to the ends

Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face;

For since he had been covered over-much

To keep him from the light glare, both his cheeks

Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose

The shepherd's heart blood ebbed away into,

The faster for his love.

• Apparently longer than the twelve book Paradise Lost.
** Having written this, I remember that Russ also wrote a rebuttal of Robert Heinlein's *Farnham's Freehold* and I imagine him joining in the conversation. My goodness.