Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant was an extraordinarily versatile and prolific Victorian author who earned the living for an extended family. In addition to her copious fiction, she turned her hand to many forms of prose, writing biographies, historical guides, and literary histories. For many years the mainstay of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine literary reviewing, in later years, she broadened her repertoire to include social and cultural commentary. Her journalism enabled her fiction to take account of changing fashions, both literary and cultural, during the almost 50 years of her professional career. The tragedies of her personal life – all her children predeceased her – and her sense that she might have been a greater artist had she not been driven by her financial responsibilities to write so much darkened her later work. [...] Her fiction, variously published, anonymously, under the initials M. O. W. O and, after her widowhood in 1859, under the name Mrs. Oliphant, ran to some 98 novels and in excess of 50 short stories (Clarke 1986). Her nonfiction embraced biographies, both of the long-dead and more recent contemporaries, historical guides to a series of major cities (Edinburgh, Florence, Jerusalem, Rome, and Venice), literary histories, and over 300 periodical articles (Clarke 1997). Although she worked with a variety of publishers in the course of a long professional life lasting almost half a century (1849–1897), her primary allegiance was to the firm of Blackwood, whose official history she was engaged in writing when she died. [...] The periods she spent living in and travelling through Europe gave her increasing confidence in both French and Italian, although she would never become entirely proficient in German. Her knowledge of these countries’ canonical literature won her the editorship of Blackwood’s Foreign Classics for English Readers. She also took a lively interest in the new literature emerging from various European countries, encouraging her readers, many of whom would have learned several modern languages, to explore the literature, history, and cultural assumptions of their continental neighbors.
