Mrs Oliphant: A Fiction to Herself: A Literary Life - Hardcover

Jay, Elisabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198128754 ISBN 13: 9780198128755

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 1997

Synopsis

As an expatriate Scots woman, Mrs Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) started her prolific and accomplished writing career at three removes from the centre of Victorian literary life. Widowed early, and left with not only her own children, but two brothers, a nephew and two nieces to support, she became keenly aware of the discrepancy between society's assumptions about woman's role and her own position as a female breadwinner in the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century publishing. Out of the contrast between her wryly ironic view of life and the conventions of Victorian fiction came the disconcerting questioning of accepted ideologies of the family, religious orthodoxy and a woman's place in society that characterizes her writing.

Mrs Oliphant: A Fiction to Herself paints an often surprising picture of the professional Victorian woman writer. By choosing to interweave the life and the work of Mrs Oliphant, Elisabeth Jay's lucid and comprehensive study raises for consideration the way in which a particular woman writer perceived her own life, and the wider question of whether women writers have been well-served by the mythological structures of male biography.

'Elisabeth Jay has drawn upon Oliphant's wide-ranging writing in numerous modes, to give a comprehensive and often surprising portrait of the professional Victorian woman writer. This study of Oliphant's career as a professional Victorian writer, of her critical and intellectual interests, and the extraordinary way in which she managed fiction and journalism over her career, will cast a new light on the period.
Elaine Showalter, Professor of English, Princeton Univesity

About this title

Review:

Elisabeth Jay has drawn upon Oliphant's wide-ranging writing in numerous modes, to give a comprehensive and often surprising portrait of the professional Victorian woman writer. This study of Oliphant's career as a professional Victorian writer, of her critical and intellectual interests, and the extraordinary way in which she managed fiction and journalism over her career, will cast a new light on the period. (Elaine Showalter, Professor of English, Princeton University)

About the Author:

Editor of The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant: The Complete Text (OUP, 1990), Author of The Religion of the Heart (OUP, 1979), Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (Macmillan, 1986), and editor of The Journal of John Wesley (OUP, 1987)

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0198128754
• ISBN 13: 9780198128755
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 376