Introduction REBECCA N. MItCHELL In 1907, a committee was formed to oversee the design and installation of a monument in honour of Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) in St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh. e Spectator, along with many leading periodicals, carried the appeal: ‘ten years have passed since the death of Mrs. Oliphant’, it began, ‘and if this test of time is needed to prove the strength of literary reputation, it seems in this case to have been successfully withstood’.1 e committee emphasized Oliphant’s literary merits, declaring her ‘among the writers of the Victorian era as probably the most distinguished Scotswoman of letters the country has produced’, even as it allowed that the demands outside of her literary life were equally relevant to her reputation: ‘In her private life she was essentially one of the “great ladies”, great in her example, great alike in her joys and her sorrows’.2 Of the list of supporters, several names were nearly always mentioned in the many news stories announcing the venture, including David Masson, J. M. Barrie and George Meredith. Masson, eminent Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University, cited Oliphant’s Life of Irving in his own writing on Carlyle’s years in Edinburgh, and Oliphant had glossed his work favourably in her Victorian Age of English Literature.3 Fellow Scotsman Barrie’s affection for Oliphant’s work was documented: in his biography of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), he wrote of her evening reading habits that ‘if the book be a story by George Eliot or Mrs. Oliphant, her favourite (and mine) among women novelists […] she will read, entranced, for hours’.4 As for Meredith, Oliphant does not figure at all in his letters or his published work; if he held an opinion about her, it is not a part of the scholarly or archival record. Yet his name alone, prominently listed among the supporters of the fundraising effort, leverages his standing in the literary community to honour Oliphant’s memory. J. H. Millar, ‘Memorial to Mrs. Oliphant in St. Giles’, Edinburgh’, e Spectator, 27 July 1907, 1 p. 126. Ibid. 2 David Masson, ‘Carlyle’s Edinburgh Life’, Macmillan’s, 45.266 (December 1881), 145–63, and 3 45.267 (January 1882), 234–56; reprinted in Edinburgh Sketches & Memories (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1892), pp. 302, 306. J. M. Barrie, Margaret Ogilvy (New York: Scribners, 1896), p. 97. Margaret Oliphant, e 4 Victorian Age of English Literature, 3 vols (London: Percival and Co., 1892), ii, 279. Yearbook of English Studies, 49 (2019), 1–10© Modern Humanities Research Association 2019 is kind of momentary connection, an affiliation recorded by the press as evidence of their shared literary standing in the public imagination, is typical of the pair of authors. Meredith and Oliphant shared a birth year, and each experienced a long and varied career that included mastery of an extraordinary range of genres, but they had little if any direct interaction. e contours of their biographies reveal parallel turns: the two were jobbing authors, dependent on their creative powers not simply to motivate a life well lived, but to sustain it practically. Oliphant’s financial tribulations are well known, documented as they are in her forthright Autobiography, published posthumously in 1899. Meredith, more circumspect about his class background or struggles, was also a single parent following the death of his estranged wife in 1861. Both engaged deeply with Continental culture: Oliphant’s many journeys were reflected in her nonfiction and travel writing, and Meredith’s formative years in Germany informed his prose and verse. Both were publishers’ readers, wielding considerable influence over the fates of authors who sought a venue for their work. And both contributed — albeit to varying degrees — to progressive women’s causes. For all of these possible points of intersection or overlap, their most obvious connections occur in the pages of the newspapers and magazines that document their literary output. Across the second half of the nineteenth century, their names regularly share the same column inches in publication announcements or advertisements: Meredith’s Emilia in England and Oliphant’s Agnes are touted in January 1864;5 his Beauchamp’s Career stands beside...
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Jun 13, 2024
Nicole Mockler 
Open Access
