Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 87 Together with a lucid and pithy analysis of the marquise's thought and writings, we are afforded lively vignettes of the social and intellectual elite to which she belonged, as well as sharply-drawn sketches of the notable men and women with whom she came into contact. The scholarly and sympathetic portrait Esther Ehrman paints of Madame du Châtelet does full justice to a woman of uncommon intelligence, courage and energy, who had a passion for the life of the mind and at the same time an irresistible fondness for such more mundane pleasures as sex, good food, gambling, fine clothes, jewels and even trinkets. As her essay on happiness makes clear, she believed in living fully, even recklessly. Her tragic and premature death, as a result of childbirth at the age of fortythree , came as a great shock to Voltaire, who, like her husband, had nothing to do with this unwelcome and late pregnancy (it was due to the ardor of her new lover, the rather vapid marquis de Saint-Lambert). It was entirely appropriate to add as an appendix at the end of the book an English translation of the moving Eloge Voltaire wrote after the death of his longtime mistress, companion and collaborator. Voltaire's eulogy was indeed the first serious attempt to assess Madame du Châtelet's life and career as a coherent whole. At a time when notable women in science, politics, letters and the arts are being rescued from oblivion or denigrating, condescending judgments, it is entirely fitting that Esther Ehrman's attractive and highly readable little book should help restore Madame du Châtelet to her rightful place as a distinguished scientist and philosophe, who went as far as a member of her sex could go in an age when such austere intellectual pursuits were considered (as indeed they would be until quite recently) as the sole purview of the superior capacities of the male brain. Gita May Columbia University Merryn Williams, Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. xv + 217 pp. $25.00. Margaret Oliphant died on June 25, 1897, as the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria was being celebrated. By the time the Queen herself died, three-and-a-half years later, "Mrs. Oliphant," as she was generally known to the public, was already slipping into oblivion, despite her 125 or so published books and hundreds of stories, reviews, and articles. Today, she is forgotten, except by critics concerned with women writers, who have recently brought several of her better novels back into print. Drawing on family papers now in the National Library of Scotland, Merryn Williams has now produced the first book-length "critical biography" of Mrs. Oliphant, in the hope of reviving the fame of a prolific and talented writer "who has been neglected for far too long." As Williams tells us, Mrs. Oliphant did not enjoy the reputation or financial reward of such contemporaries as Anthony Trollope or George Eliot. She acknowledged the superiority of their work to her own but chafed at the unjust fate that forced her to write in such haste and under such pressure that she could seldom do her best. Her lot was to write, incessantly, to make enough money to support her large family. Widowed in 1859, after seven years of fitful marriage to a gifted but economically unsophisticated painter and stained-glass maker (of whom little detailed information 88 biography Vol. 11,No. 1 and no photograph survive), she was virtually the sole source of income for a household that at one time numbered eight persons, including a dipsomanic, defrocked, clerical brother. Although she complained at times in her letters and the fragmentary autobiography she left at her death, she kept churning out novels and historical studies for almost fifty years. In her biography, Williams makes the case that Margaret Oliphant was more than a courageous toiler who, as Thomas Hardy wrote bitterly after her harsh review οι Jude the Obscure, "flooded the magazines and starved out scores of better workers." She was in her best novels (which Williams numbers at fifteen) an artist of considerable stylistic power and moral insight. Although Williams...