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The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant COLEC~AO LlTERATU RA 3 CENTRO DE ESTUDOS EM LETRAS UNIYERSIDADE DE EYORA ANA CLARA BIRRENTO THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARGARET OLIPHANT The Story of a Woman - A Landscape of the Self Preface by Elisabeth Jay EVORA - MMXI Titulo: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARGARET OLIPHANT The Story of a Woman - A Landscape of the Self Colecyao: Literatura 3 Autora: Ana Clara Birrento Prefacio: Elisabeth Jay Edi9aO: Centro de Estudos em Letras Universidade de Evora Deposito Legal: BA-387/2011 ISBN: 978-972-99292-1-2 Tiragem: 300 exemplares Capa: Cristina Brazio, Funda9ao Luis de Molina Universidade de Evora THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARGARET OLIPHANT The Story of a Woman – A Landscape of the Self The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Self Margaret Oliphant 1828-189 4 The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Self Contents Preface............................................................................................................ Introductory Note ...........................................................................................6 Introduction 1. The critical fortune of Margaret Oliphant .......................................... 9 2. The critical fortune of The Autobiography....................................... 28 Chapter I – Autobiography: a text of life in a new landscape 1. Autobiography or the enunciation of experience............................. 40 2. Memory, Time and Place.................................................................. 57 3. The formal paradigms and the feminist critique............................. 67 Chapter II – The Story of a Woman 1. Questions of Edition ........................................................................80 2. The Autobiography ...........................................................................85 Chapter III – A Landscape of the Self 1. The conditions of possibility for the self......................................... 98 2. The construction of the self in the family circle ............................ 111 2.1. The parents and the brothers....................................... 112 a) The mother – Margaret Oliphant Wilson..............114 b) The Father – Francis Wilson ................................120 c) The brothers – Frank and William (Willie) .........120 2.2 The Husband – Frank Oliphant ...................................121 2.3 The Children (Maggie, Tiddy and Cecco)................. 125 3. The construction of the self in the professional circle ....................136 4. The different form of autobiographical writing ..............................146 Conclusion ..................................................................................................156 Editions of The Autobiography ..................................................................166 References ...................................................................................................167 5 The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Self Preface A time-honoured introduction to critical re-evaluations of long-dead authors is to say that the writer in question would have been both astonished and delighted to find his or her work receiving such attention. Margaret Oliphant, the subject of this book, however, would have been far more likely to have greeted the news with a wry smile, partly self-deprecatory, partly springing from a barely disguised sense that the belated dues to a lifetime of hard work were finally being paid, and partly conceding that, in the final analysis, it was hard to say what the accolade for her work counted for when set against the fact that all her children had predeceased her. She would, however, have been unequivocally pleased to see her work receiving attention beyond British shores and in a European context. The sense, enjoyed by many leading Victorian writers, that they were playing in a European arena, rather than within the narrower confines of the Anglophone world, is a dimension of nineteenth-century culture which badly needs recuperating. Studies by European critics such as Ana Clara Birrento will contribute to this project. Oliphant’s own attempt to lay out her life ‘as a landscape of the self’, as this study reveals, demonstrates a particular quality of ‘self-reflexivity’. Written over a period of years, which saw her self-inscription change from self-communing, to a document intended at first for her immediate family, and finally for a wider public, her autobiography was forced to negotiate transitions between the confessional voice, and intimate anecdote, and the public world of the professional writer. Ana Clara Birrento opens up for today’s reader the political nature of the choices that Oliphant made in creating this autobiographical self. The study attends both to the specifics of Oliphant’s Autobiography - its composition, textual strategies, and reception history - and views it through a series of theoretical prisms which encourage us to reflect on what this particular text has to teach us about the protean potential of the autobiographical genre. Elisabeth Jay Oxford Brookes University, 2010. 6 The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Self INTRODUCTION The critical fortune of Margaret Oliphant Said to have been the most neglected novelist ever (Clarke 1979), Margaret Oliphant was considered until the 70s of the twentieth century a hack writer, a ‘literary-Jack-of-all-trades’ or a ‘pot boiler’ (Vineta and Robert Colby 1966), a novelist who wrote too much and too quickly, with an eye to the market; her prolific amount of work became a myth of her literary status, an over production that prevented her from composing a work of lasting reputation and created the idea that she mutilated her talent, compromised her career and the integrity of her work. The voluminous production of about 400 essays, of 100 novels, and of many histories of European culture, of English literature and biographies has undoubtedly contributed to this opinion. Easily identifiable in three distinct and seemingly paradoxical moments, Oliphant’s critical fortune has known, in a first period, respectful recognition by her contemporaries, vanguard proclamations of an indefatigable pot-boiler, in a second, and, finally, literary resuscitation (Jay 1999). The conditions and progress of Margaret Oliphant’s critical fortune connected with aesthetic processes and with the political and historical contexts of literary and cultural evaluation. From a positive appreciation by most of her contemporaries to accusations of mercenary and depreciations of her professional and personal choices, to a reconsideration of her art, coincident with the end of WWII, and a revision of her place in the panorama of Victorian literature, I have found in many articles of scholarly journals, in book 7 The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Self chapters, and in British and foreign PhD dissertations, reasons to affirm that the novelist does deserve a place on the stage of the nineteenth- century literature. She is a figure that cannot be ignored in the reproduction and consolidation of the critical, cultural and literary mentality of her time. Thus, one of the aims of this work is to help consolidate the place she won by right, the place of a great Victorian writer, who responded to every keynote of her contemporary society: Mrs. Oliphant also wrote competent criticism and played the part, still comparatively novel among women, of an all-round practical journalist, knowing the world of letters, familiar with the publishers and the business of authorship, handling history of biography like a person of culture. (Blair 2007: 191) Throughout her career, she enjoyed popular success and (...) by the end of her career Oliphant’s work was read not only in England and Scotland, the original audience of her bifocal authorial vision, but in North America and throughout Europe, by courtesy of Tauchnitz editions and other translations (Jay 1999: 159). In most of the articles published anonymously in many Victorian periodicals,4 Margaret Oliphant was applauded due to the realism of her characters, sharply drawn, and to the shrewd delineations of the true, actual feelings and thoughts of people, dealing with themes common in life but rare in fiction: What a wonderfully full portrait-gallery hers is! If there are few portraits in it of very exceptional physiognomy, it embraces every variety of our every-day folk in their ordinary habit, and no artist has given these with more fidelity and minuteness. It 4 cf. Atlantic Monthly, The Academy, The Athenaeum, Blackwood’s, British Weekly, Christian Remembrance, Cornhill Magazine, The Edinburgh Review, The Fortnightly Review, The Nonconformist, The Quarterly Review, The Saturday Review, The Spectator, The Scottish Review and The Westminster Review. 8 The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Self might have been thought that this art, so unflinchingly truthful, yet so completely free from this spice of truth, satire, would not be sufficiently appreciated; but Mrs. Oliphant’s early recognition by the reading public and her enduring popularity are happy tokens, and prove again, if further proof were necessary, that nothing in literature is so sure of success as honesty of workmanship. Mrs. Oliphant has followed the natural bent of her talent, making no concessions to the supposed demands of the public either on the point of sensation or of
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