Margaret Oliphant

• Born: April 4, 1828
• Birthplace: Wallyford, Scotland
• Died: June 25, 1897
• Place of death: Windsor, England

Biography

Margaret Oliphant Wilson was born on April 4, 1828, in Walleyford, Scotland. She was the third of three children and the first daughter born to Francis Wilson, a clerk, and Margaret Wilson. When her father accepted at clerkship at the Royal Bank in 1834, the family moved to Glasgow, where Margaret, who had taught herself to read at age six, began availing herself of the circulating library system. The family moved again to Liverpool in 1838, when her father accepted another clerkship in the export department of the Customs House.

The Wilsons were religious and political liberals and they soon became involved in reform work among the working class in Liverpool. These experiences were crucial for shaping the social philosophies Margaret distilled into her writing. In 1849, she published Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland, a romantic novel that explored the challenges facing an independent, free-thinking woman in contemporary Scotland. It was the first of nearly one hundred books of fiction and nonfiction in which Wilson examined timely social and political themes.

On May 4, 1852, Margaret married her first cousin, Frank Oliphant, an aspiring painter who designed stained-glass windows for a living. The Oliphant household became dependent on Margaret’s income, and she proved an indefatigable writer who produced two or three books per year and who became Queen Victoria’s favorite novelist. Over the next few years, Margaret juggled writing with domestic duties. Her daughter Maggie was born in 1853. She bore two more children, both of whom died, before the birth of her oldest son, Cyril, in 1856. Oliphant wrote energetically during this time, and began contributing articles regularly to Blackwood’s magazine, many on the issue of women’s rights.

Wilson lost another child in 1858, then was devastated by the loss of her husband, who died in 1859 in Rome, where the family had moved to help him overcome his tuberculosis. In debt and pregnant with her second son, Francis, who was born in December of that year, Oliphant became a dependable and prolific commercial writer, writing essays on a wide variety of topics and reviews of popular fiction.

A series of works published in these years, including The Rector and the Doctor’s Family (1863), Salem Chapel (1863), and The Perpetual Curate (1864), form the foundation of her multivolume Chronicles of Carlingford, an immensely popular series of novels featuring elements of melodrama and the Gothic romance in which she satirized the regliosity and hypocrisy of contemporary small-town life. The money Oliphant earned allowed her to move back to England from Rome in 1864, the same year that her oldest daughter died.

She became a ubiquitous presence in Cornhill Magazine, Macmillan’s Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, and other publications, writing on a variety of topical subjects ranging from the role of women in society to biocritical appreciations and literary critiques. Her prodigious output as a journalist and novelist coincided with her absorption of the family of her oldest brother after his wife died and the schooling of both his children and her own.

In 1879, Oliphant wrote A Beleaguered City, a historical novel with occult overtones. She followed this in the 1880’s with a quantity of short novels and tales that related some of the philosophical and moral truths she had elaborated in her realistic novels through plots built around supernatural experience. These were collected in A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen (1882), Two Stories of the Seen and Unseen (1885), and Stories of the Seen and Unseen (1889). In the last twelve years of her life, although hobbled increasingly by arthritis, she published more than seventy-five books and more than one hundred contributions to periodicals. She died at her home in Windsor on June 25, 1897. Another five of her books were published posthumously.