Excuse my dust: Margaret Oliphant
Debts and Deaths....
- One husband – died after 7 years of marriage
- Six children – all died before her (3 as babies; her beloved daughter, Maggie aged 10 in 1864; 2 sons, Cecco and Cyril died in their mid 30s in 1890s)
- 2 brothers (one alcoholic, one bankrupt)
- Various nieces, nephews and ‘friends’
- All depended on her for financial and moral support
Why read her
- It is not that she wrote so much, but that so much she wrote is so good
- Her language – natural, easy flow, rarely pompous or didactic (Eliot)
- Humour, irony – at times quite sharp satire (Austen, Trollope)
- Complex characters – people as they are not as they should be
- Strong, no-nonsense, quick-witted and clear-headed women figures
- Her novels start where others leave off – no happy ever after
- “The bracing realism, the absence of smugness, the awareness of the rougher side of life could not have existed if M.O. (…) had been a protected upper middle-class lady” (Merryn Williams, p. 188)
- Life was “full of broken threads and illogical conclusions, and lacks altogether the unity of the regularly constructed fiction, which confines itself to the graceful task of conducting two virtuous young persons through a labyrinth of difficulties to a happy marriage (…) Yet at the same time everybody knows that there are many lives which only begin after that first fair chapter of youthful existence is completed” (Agnes, 1865)