Margaret Oliphant Becomes a Heroine: Tracing a Literary Tradition

Abstract

Throughout her career as a novelist and critic, Margaret Oliphant showed great interest in the emergence of a female literary tradition, and particularly the creation of the heroine. In her criticism she identifies Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot as innovators. Her commentary on these writers, scattered across several of her essays and reviews, reveals her admiration for the way these women advanced the female literary tradition. Oliphant’s critique of sensation fiction, the subject of much subsequent commentary, is actually directed not at the genre itself but at the focus on physical passion. Oliphant feared that readers, especially younger readers, might be negatively influenced by this skewed portrait of femininity. That same fear motivates her harsh assessment of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. While Oliphant the critic was establishing principles by which to judge women’s fiction, Oliphant the novelist was working to secure her own place in the tradition, crafting novels that are in some ways models for and critiques of the tradition in which she hopes to find a place.