From Walter Scott to John Addington Symonds: Margaret Oliphant Confronts the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

During her reviewing career of over forty years (1853-97), the extraordinarily prolific Margaret Oliphant covered a wide range of writers, but has a reputation for old-fashioned attitudes towards literature. Partly challenging such a view, this chapter focuses mainly on Oliphant's publications for and about Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and concentrates largely on British novelists. These authors span the nineteenth century, and include early figures such as Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and Jane Austen, mid-century novelists such as Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë, and later writers such as Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Oliphant does tend to celebrate earlier novelists, especially Scott, as having a broader conception of life than do more recent figures, who, she believes, fixate on sexual passion and/ or psychological analysis; she also views with nostalgia the early decades of the century which were actually beyond her personal experience. But at the same time, Oliphant recognizes that magazine editors and publishers of her own day are more receptive to women writers than their predecessors were. She also welcomes, in James's fiction, his treatment of life's broken threads and uncertainties, and in Stevenson's, his ability to confront the darker aspects of human potential.