Expanding a "Limited Orbit": Margaret Oliphant, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the Development of a Critical Voice

Abstract

The development of Margaret Oliphant's authoritative critical voice was a process that took decades. Oliphant (1828–1897) began to lobby for reviewing opportunities early in her literary career, and her first reviews for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Maga) appeared just two years after the publication of her first Blackwood's novel (Katie Stewart [1852]), in the June 1854 "Our Library Table" column. Despite her 1855 comment to John Blackwood that "a feminine critic must find but a limited orbit possible to her," Oliphant continued to press for reviewing assignments (Friday n.d. 1855; NLS MS4111). If owning her gender might limit her options, then she would veil it: when she proposed in 1855 to write on "the Jane Eyre School – those books which are so unwomanly that they only could have been written by women," Oliphant promised "to keep from scratching, and conceal the feminine hand" (to John Blackwood, n.d. 1855; NLS MS4111). How well she managed to "conceal the feminine hand" – or her own particular identity – over the ensuing forty-plus years is open to debate; her frequent protests in her correspondence with the Blackwoods that she had not revealed her identity as author of one article or another suggest that her powers of (or genuine will to) concealment were not great. However, Oliphant's consistent support of anonymous publishing practices, especially as they pertained to criticism, strongly suggests that she found those practices useful, and her regular assumption of a masculine mask in her criticism – even when she and her editors knew that her true identity had been penetrated – calls attention to the very vexed question of gender and critical authority in the Victorian era.1 The sheer volume of Oliphant's critical work makes it an invaluable case study for examining the role of gender in the development of a critical voice in the nineteenth century. As J. Haythornthwaite points out in a 1990 study of Oliphant's relationship with the firm of William Blackwood [End Page 199] & Sons, while Oliphant's critical stance remained fairly consistent over the years, her critical persona changed, from a masculine one in her earliest criticism in the 1850s, to one that Haythornthwaite describes as "very definitely feminine and matriarchal, the literary equivalent of Queen Victoria" (80); this latter persona is perhaps most evident in the 1860s and 1870s, when Oliphant launched her scathing attacks on sensation fiction.2 In the final decade of her life, however, Oliphant's critical persona changed yet again, first to the convivial masculine inhabitant of "The Old Saloon," and then to the weary flaneur of "The Looker-on." These two distinct personae provide a key to understanding how Oliphant responded to the changes in critical taste and practice that had occurred over her long career, and to what degree the "limited orbit" available to the "feminine critic" had expanded. "A plan which has been long in my mind": Defining a Critical Sphere The ideas for both "The Old Saloon" and "The Looker-on" were Oli-phant's, and the fact that both were promptly taken up by Blackwood's is a key sign that Oliphant's position with the firm was on a distinctly more professional footing in the 1880s and '90s than it had been in previous decades. During the first thirty years of her career, Oliphant's appeals to both Blackwood's and Macmillan's for steady critical or editorial work were generally brushed off.3 The low point may have come in 1874, when Oliphant learned that one of her proposals to Blackwood's, a series on continental authors, was being launched under the editorship of W. Lucas Collins. Oliphant remonstrated sharply with John Blackwood, and the editorship of the "Foreign Classics" series was eventually placed in her hands (Colby and Colby 158–59).4...