25 June: Boreham on Margaret Oliphant

A Very Gallant Lady
On June 25, 1897, there passed away a truly amazing woman who, although now largely forgotten, was in her day one of the really dynamic forces in the literary life of England. In his "Victorian Age in Literature," G. K. Chesterton speaks of Margaret Oliphant's "Beleaguered City," as a typical representative of all that is best in our literature. Her output was prodigious, remarkable alike for its range, its variety and its bulk. Fiction, history, biography and general literature were all alike to her. Nobody knew what kind of book Mrs. Oliphant would write next. Mr. Blackwood, the famous publisher, who was so staunch a friend both to her and to George Eliot, says that, when the postman brought him a bundle of manuscripts from Margaret Oliphant he felt that a surprise packet lay before him.

In all, she wrote about 120 volumes. Her friends marvelled at her energy and versatility. She turned with the greatest ease from a highly imaginative romance to a work involving an intimate knowledge of Italian conditions in the Middle Ages. She would produce a fascinating Scottish love story, alive with tenderness, humour, and charm and immediately followed it with a history of the reign of George the Second. Having penned an exquisite idyll of the English countryside, its pages redolent of primroses and new-mown hay, she would present the world with a critical Life of St. Francis d'Assisi or a sympathetic biography of Professor Tulloch.

Woman Follows Her Heart And Gladly Pays
The record of Margaret Oliphant is reminiscent of the records of Frances Trollope and Charlotte Bronte. Denying themselves sleep, all three of these intrepid women toiled frantically at their manuscripts in order to sustain the brittle lives of those they loved. In Mrs. Oliphant's case everything went against her. Her troubles began with her wedding. At the age of 24 she married her cousin, Francis Wilson Oliphant, an artist, who specialised in stained glass. The union had two serious drawbacks, and Margaret deliberately contracted it with her eyes open to them both. The first was that her husband's art, though of the highest quality, brought in next to nothing in the way of income: the second was that he was in extremely delicate health. The wiseacres will declare that, in such circumstances, Margaret should not have married him. Since the world began, the wiseacres have been shaking their grave heads in that sage way; and, since the world began, women have been following the dictates of their own hearts in scorn of consequence.

During the seven years of her married life she wrote several novels and gave birth to five children, two of whom perished in infancy. Then, in 1859, her husband's health failed completely, and the doctors assured her that his only chance of recovery lay in a visit to Italy. Without a moment's delay, Mrs. Oliphant took him to Rome—and buried him there. "A thousand pounds of debt," she write at this distracted moment, "a matter of two hundred pounds insurance money; some furniture warehoused; and my faculties, such as they are!" Shortly afterwards, another child was born; the children inherited their father's treacherous lungs; and the mother lived to bury them all. Five years after her husband's death Margaret Oliphant revisited Rome, taking with her her little daughter, aged eleven; but the child was seized with serious illness during the stay and the mother laid the girl in her father's grave. Two of the sons reached manhood, one dying in 1890 and one in 1894; but both were prevented by ill health and misfortune from sharing their mother's heavy burden.

A Calm Sunset After A Day Of Storm
In addition to all this, Mrs. Oliphant's brother returned from Canada, widowed and ruined, bringing his three children with him. Without a second thought, Mrs. Oliphant took the party under her care and pledged herself to their support. The brother died; but two of the children—a son and a daughter—became the companions and the comfort of Mrs. Oliphant's later years. Nor did she manage her household in any half-hearted or niggardly way. She held that a woman who wins recognition in the world of letters should live in a beautiful home and dispense a generous hospitality; and although to gratify this proud ambition the midnight oil had to be regularly burned, she remained true to her ideal. If ever a woman lived to whose faults posterity should be a little blind, that woman was Margaret Oliphant. It is, of course, perfectly true that she wrote far too much, scurrying over the sheets, with a flying pen in her feverish haste to get the manuscript into the publisher's hands. Her sentences are often clumsy; her style ungraceful; her words ill-chosen. And the pity of it all is that it need not have been so. She had it in her to write with faultless felicity, immaculate artistry, and resistless charm. If only she could have devoted a year to the manuscript that she was compelled by dire necessity to finish in a month!

But it was impossible. The clock was against her. Had she spent 12 months on the work to which she devoted but one, she would have produced a much more perfect book—perhaps a classic—but then it would not have brought her 12 times as much money. And she was so placed that money mattered, and mattered desperately. So, with all its disfigurements and defects, the hastily scribbled sheets had to go. In all the circumstances, the wonder is that she did so well. She made for herself a name that was a household word in every home in England. For nearly a generation she was a force to be reckoned with, and nobody could afford to ignore her. There are probably still living, old people who can recall the days when no self-respecting reader would have cared to admit that they knew nothing of Mrs. Oliphant's "Beleaguered City" or "Salem Chapel." One or two of her works will live, and as long as they are read, Margaret Oliphant will elicit the admiration and the gratitude that her remarkable gifts and her sterling character equally merit.

F W Boreham

Image: Margaret Oliphant