THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARGARET OLIPHANT - Utad

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHYOFMARGARET OLIPHANTThe Story of a Woman – A Landscape of the Self

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfMargaret Oliphant1828-1894

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfContentsPreface............................................................................................................Introductory Note ...........................................................................................6Introduction1. The critical fortune of Margaret Oliphant .......................................... 92. The critical fortune of The Autobiography....................................... 28Chapter I – Autobiography: a text of life in a new landscape1. Autobiography or the enunciation of experience............................. 402. Memory, Time and Place.................................................................. 573. The formal paradigms and the feminist critique............................. 67Chapter II – The Story of a Woman1. Questions of Edition ........................................................................802. The Autobiography ...........................................................................85Chapter III – A Landscape of the Self1. The conditions of possibility for the self......................................... 982. The construction of the self in the family circle ............................ 1112.1. The parents and the brothers....................................... 112a) The mother – Margaret Oliphant Wilson..............114b) The Father – Francis Wilson ................................120c) The brothers – Frank and William (Willie) .........1202.2 The Husband – Frank Oliphant ...................................1212.3 The Children (Maggie, Tiddy and Cecco)................. 1253. The construction of the self in the professional circle ....................1364. The different form of autobiographical writing ..............................146Conclusion ..................................................................................................156Editions of The Autobiography ..................................................................166References ...................................................................................................1675

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfmight have been thought that this art, so unflinchingly truthful,yet so completely free from this spice of truth, satire, would notbe sufficiently appreciated; but Mrs. Oliphant’s early recognitionby the reading public and her enduring popularity are happytokens, and prove again, if further proof were necessary, thatnothing in literature is so sure of success as honesty ofworkmanship. Mrs. Oliphant has followed the natural bent of hertalent, making no concessions to the supposed demands of thepublic either on the point of sensation or of sentiment, and theresult has shown her wisdom. Whether many generations willcontinue to hold her in remembrance, and, better still, to readher, is a matter on which it is idle to speculate (…) Mrs. Oliphanthas steered very clear of these two dangers; and while peoplecontinue to be interested in reading about men and women thereseems to be no reason why they should not continue to read thebooks in which her men and women are so well described.(Slater 1897: 689-690)She was often praised for the excellence, the individuality, andthe variety of her portraits of women, and for her special quality inrepresenting clergymen. Reviewers agreed in the tone of appraisal notonly of her concern with religion, but also in her talent in theinnovative composition of the female protagonists and in showing thelower classes. Being a Presbyterian by birth, during her lifetime sheattended religious services in Catholic churches, in the Continent, andin Anglican churches in England, a fact that accounts for her free spiritand religious freedom, in the words of many critics. She was hence ableto create a vast gallery of characters connected with religion and withthe conflicts within the Church, ranging from High Church, to BroadChurch and Low Church, as well as within the Dissenting community,an achievement that revealed her religious tolerance.The Chronicles of Carlingford were considered the greatestexample of her skills, the hallmark of her artistic capacity as a novelist– a valuable source for sociologists and social historians as human9

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfdocuments – and her book The Literary History of England from 1790to 1825 was considered one of the most pleasant books on Englishliterature (Skelton 1883: 73).Those periodicals paid tribute to Margaret Oliphant’s strengthand originality, applauding her minute observations, attention to detailand the creation of common characters who became real through herimaginative effort to bring them to the readers in simple humancontexts of experience; she was also applauded for her distinctintellectual quality and profound perception of life. The obituaries werein general respectful in tone; she was applauded by a VictorianAnglican public, who much appreciated the fact that she had giventhem the opportunity to know, namely in The Chronicles of Carlingfordthe world of the non-conformists, which important Victorian authorslike Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope or George Eliot mostlyignored.But the critical tone we find after the posthumous publication in1899 of the Autobiography started to change, relegating the author to asecond plane, to the place of a survivor of the old-fashioned values ofthe Victorian frame of mind, whose mentality, as Furtado and Malafaia(1992) explain, constitutes the most complete repository of theinterests, values, ideas and conventions and also of the ghosts of theEuropean bourgeoisie of the time.According to Elizabeth Jay (2002), in 1898 some titles couldstill be found in the annual catalogue of Mudie’s Library, but since theneditors have never been contacted again and the not so cheapsubscription of Margaret Oliphant’s works did not attract a universeand an editorial market more and more diverse and in expansion.Although some cheap editions of some of her novels kept circulating in10

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfthe first years of the twentieth century, neither their format nor theirfictional themes appealed to the post-war generation,(...) only Salem Chapel, A Beleaguered City and perhapsKirsteen were likely to be remembered, along with two ghoststories, "The Open Door" and "The Library Window", whichwere often reprinted in anthologies. (Clarke n/d: 32)Her popularity never reached the level of best-sellers;nonetheless, Margaret Oliphant knew success, having occupied anindisputable place in the Victorian intellectual and artistic milieu. Shewas applauded as a novelist, feared as a critic and respected as awoman of letters. Her privileged position at Blackwood’s PublishingHouse as a ‘literary-Jack-of-all-trades’ conferred her power andinfluence , of which she was aware, to mould public opinion, creatingcharacters that involved the readers, and representing by means of aknowable community 5alteration of the social order (Oliphant 1870).the subtle sense of change previous to anyMargarete Rubik’s The Novels of Mrs. Oliphant: A SubversiveView of Traditional Themes (1994) highlights the subversion of clichéand the innovative treatment of conventional themes, stressing thedichotomy, so common in Margaret Oliphant’s works, betweenconformity and non-conformity to rules, conventions and ideologies.Discussing how the novelist adhered to traditional patterns, Rubikshowed how she was able to subvert and play with the conventions,projecting her personality into the novels, thus giving voice to unusualvalues and opinions:Her fiction is informed by the tension between traditionalism andsubversion, between adhering to conventional values and radically5 cf. Birrento, Ana Clara. As Crónicas de Carlingford e a Autobiografia de MargaretOliphant: Contributo para um Estudo da Comunidade Conhecível. Évora: 2002 (PhDDissertation).11

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfchallenging Victorian ideals. (…) In her novels about marriage sheoften turns Victorian stereotypes upside down and conveys anunromantic, prosaic impression of married life. Family hierarchy andthe creed of the complete submission of children are questioned,although sentimentality and iconoclasm, maudlin identification withher mother figures and the uncompromising description of familyconflicts tend to clash. (Rubik 1994: 2- 3)In Nobody’s Angels, Middle-Class Women and DomesticIdeology in Victorian Culture (1995), Elizabeth Langland analyses howdomesticity functions as the basis for cultural meanings in MargaretOliphant’s fiction, emphasizing questions of identity and representationand the modes individuals are constructed by means of discursivepractices aiming to distinguish the Self from the Other:(…) in an even more striking ideological revisions, Oliphantdramatises the way in which women bond within localsociopolitical spheres to facilitate class agendas, andmarriageable men function as pawns or tokens through whichclass allegiances are defined and solidified by women. (…)Challenging as they do, so many sacred Victorian cows –romance, angels, feminine duty, innocence, passivity, and theseparation of home and state – we must ask if Oliphant’s novelshave been consigned to obscurity, if not oblivion, for that verychallenge, a position that reads canons as repositories of aculture’s professed values and self-representations. Oliphant’svision of reality, however faithful to quotidian affairs, piercedthe myths that were sedulously guarded in other depictions ofVictorian life. (Langland 1995: 153)Both her fictional work and her Autobiography were for thenineteenth-century reader and still are a precious contribution to theunderstanding of novels as knowable communities and of autographyas a landscape of the self. Choosing to represent characters thatdeveloped a plausible oppositional identity in their experiences of life,in their relationships and in the leverage of dissidence derived from theconflict and contradiction that the social order produced, her novels and12

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfher Autobiography create faultline stories that comprise the ghosts ofthe stories they are trying to exclude (Sinfield 1992).When she was not placed side by side with George Eliot,Margaret Oliphant was considered to be the second woman novelist ofher generation after Elizabeth Gaskell’s death. 6 Generally comparedwith Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, critics believed that Oliphant,unlike Trollope and despite her massive literary production, neverneglected the construction of the stories and the correction of herwriting. Moreover, she(…) had gifts denied to Trollope, she had eloquence, charm andstyle, grace and ease where he is clumsy and heavy. Above allshe had the power to construct a story full of high-strungsituations, yet in no way sinning against common sense; and herinsight into feminine character and skill to depict it at least rivalhis mastery over men. (Anonymous 1899a: 36)Different was also the way Oliphant looked at socialtransformations: whereas George Eliot looked back in nostalgia,Margaret Oliphant dealt openly with the struggle between thelimitations imposed by class and the impulse to ascend socially.After her death, on 25 thJune 1897, Margaret Oliphant wasalmost forgotten and her fortune changed due, to a large extent, to thedamaging influential voices of Leslie Stephen 7and his daughter.Imbued with the elitist, high-culture spirit of Bloomsbury, they6 cf. Towsend, Meredith. Obituary of Mrs. Oliphant, (1897); Anonymous. ‘Mrs.Oliphant and her Rivals’ by One Who Knew Her. The Academy.1897).7 Leslie Stephen, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Margaret Oliphant met during asummer holiday in Switzerland. According to Blair “While Stephen conceives ofOliphant’s career in terms of dilemma and compromises, Ritchie’s professionalrelationship with Oliphant points to the kind of female authorship that Woolf’sthinking back through our mothers idealizes. (…) From the professional connectionsamong Oliphant, Ritchie and Woolf, a pattern of feminine influence emerges:Oliphant mentored Ritchie and Ritchie served (….) as the model of an educatedman’s daughter who then became an author in her own right for Woolf.” (2007: 119)13

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfdenigrated Margaret Oliphant’s personal image and professionalachievements.They thought that Oliphant had compromised her artisticproduction by catering not only for the needs of the marketplace butalso for a large dependent family of seven 8 .Like her father, Virginia Woolf found Oliphant guilty as awriter and as a woman (Blair 2007). Relegating her to a second-rateposition, as a mere scribbler, Woolf set the tone of criticism until the70s, writing in Three Guineas one of the fiercest attacks on thenovelist, accusing her of selling her brain and of prostituting culture, ofenslaving her intellectual freedom in order to survive and to bring upher children. Woolf suggested that reading Margaret Oliphant’s fictionleft the reader’s mind and imagination dirty as the continuous writingof marketable fiction had made the novelist complicit with the politicalevils of a patriarchal system. Virginia Woolf would therefore disavowthe novelist’s struggle with the material conditions that the middle-classwoman writer faced. According to Blair (2007), Woolf’s appreciationof Oliphant revealed a literary hierarchy that created aesthetic value bydistancing it from economic necessity.But if, according to Woolf, the exhaustion of Oliphant’screativity hindered her to write a few good works, Elizabeth Jay, on theother hand, considers that all the reviewing fuelled her talent; being anavid reader of the work of other writers, English or foreign, was anenriching experience and gave her a cosmopolitan vision of the Englishaffairs.8 Besides her three children, she had also to provide for her widowed brother Frankand his 3 children due to his economic difficulties.14

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfThe closing years of the nineteenth century and the openingyears of the twentieth were crucial moments for the destruction ofMargaret Oliphant’s literary and cultural reputation.The emergence of a new literary environment and of newstructures of feeling left the novelist outside the literary canon ongrounds of being old-fashioned and conventional: a queen of thecirculating libraries 9 (Walbank 1950), then deemed to be the harbourof mediocre writers. The literary canon excluded her from the pantheonof the great 10 as the literary scene of the end of the nineteenth centurywas changing; we cannot forget that the popular three-decker novelswere no longer well accepted and the market was more and morediverse, based on different literary and aesthetic preoccupations. Allthese aspects impinged upon Margaret Oliphant.9Mudie’s Select Library was the most well-known of these. The circulating librarieswere a phenomenon in the history of English literature and culture, considered bymany as a Leviathan institution. During the 19th century, readers borrowed booksfrom these libraries instead of buying the first editions of the novels. The specialconditions of the literary market of mid-nineteenth century happened due to theexpensive prices of the novels and to the dominion of the circulating libraries. Novelsused to be published in 3 volumes (three deckers), but their price was not important asno one bought them. As Griest (1970) explains, the novels were announced not forsale but being available to the public in circulating libraries which negotiated such ahuge discount with the editors that the average price of the novels circulating in thehands of the readers was, as a rule, half the price paid by the general public. Thepublication in three volumes and the dissemination of borrowed books was aphenomenon closely connected to Charles Edward Mudie, who, between 1842 and1894, lent books in a shop in Bloomsbury. In 1894, the Library Establishment –Mudie’s Limited associated with its rival W.H.Smith and destroyed the three-deckernovel, a format for which they had been responsible as they turned it into the mainobject of the Victorian literary market. The adjective ‘select’ was also carefullychosen, reassuring the readers that what they were reading complied with the moralcontrol that the word promised. For the novelist the amount of novels these librariesreserved was crucial, because this indicator was useful to establish their market value,a factor that either increased or decreased their power of negotiation.10Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for example, do not include Margaret Oliphant inthe Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1979). However, her name has anentry in the Dictionary of British Women Writers (1989), where a short biographicalnote is provided and where the Chronicles of Carlingford are considered her bestwork due to the focus on the struggle between temperament and ideology.15

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfThe emergent authors condemned the Victorian age and itsprovincial and sentimental culture. According to Raymond Williams([1970] 1984), this was a period that lasted until the Second WorldWar, with such names as William Butler Yeats (1865-1974), BernardShaw (1856-1950), James Joyce (1882-1941), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)and Ezra Pound (1885-1972), who headed a new literary and artisticsensitivity dominated by the male sex, excluding women that during thenineteenth century had been at the centre of a notable work of culturalconstruction.Margaret Oliphant was well aware of the transformations thatwere taking place in the end of the century in the expansion of marketsfor literary criticism and the publishing of new periodicals aiming at awider readership. In the preface to The Ways of Life (1897), the lastbook to be published before her death and considered by some as herown obituary, she called that moment ‘the ebb tide,’ showing anextraordinary and eloquent consciousness of her coeval literary andcultural scene:(...) the strange discovery which a man makes when he findshimself carried away by the retiring waters, no longer coming inupon the top of the wave, but going out. This does notnecessarily mean the decline of life, the approach of age - orany natural crisis, but something more poignant - the wonderfuland overwhelming revelation which one time or other comes tomost people, that their career, whatever it may have been hascome to a stop; that such successes as they may have achievedare over, and that henceforward they must accustom themselvesto the thought of going out with the tide. It is a very startlingdiscovery to one who has perhaps been going with a tolerablyfull sail, without any consciousness of weakened energies orfailing power.16

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfWriters of fiction, and those whose work it is to realise andexhibit, as far as in them lies, the vicissitudes and alterations oflife, are more usually employed in illustrating the advance ofthat tide in showing how it is caught or lost, and with what animpetus, and what accompaniments it flings itself higher andhigher up upon the beach, with the sunshine triumphant in thewhirl of the big wave as it turns over and breaks into foam, andthe flood claps its hands with a rejoicing noise. But yet the ebbhas its poetry, too; the colours are more sombre, the sentiment isdifferent. The flood which in its rise seemed almost individual,pervaded by something like conscious life of force and pleasure,becomes like an abstract relentless fate when it pours back intothe deep gulf of a sea of forgetfulness, with a rush of whitenedpebbles dragged from the beach, or a long expanse of uncoveredsands left bare, studded with slippery fragments of rock and thebones of shipwrecked boats. These are no more than symbols ofthe rising and falling again of human feeling, which, in all itsphases, is of the highest interest to those who recognise, even inits imaginary developments, a shadow of their own.The moment when we first perceive that our individual tide hasturned is one which few persons will find it possible to forget.We look on with a piteous surprise to see our little triumphs, ournot-little hopes, the future we had still believed in, the past inwhich we thought our name and fame would still be to the good,whatever happened, all floating out to sea to be lost there, out ofsight of men. (Oliphant 1897: 7-9)In fact, what happened to the English fiction between 1890 and1914 was not only an ebb tide, it was a period of crisis, of separation ofthe path of fiction: from a social to an individualist or psychologicalone (Williams [1970] 1984), and Margaret Oliphant floated out of sea,going away with the tide:The aesthetic values of the nineties are famous: on the one handthe realistic, "naturalistic", exploration of experience howeverugly, sordid, painful, sexually explicit, and subversive ofpreconceived ideas; on the other hand the pursuit of the distilledessence of meaning and of precision of vocabulary, the givingof priority to mood, atmosphere and intensity of feeling ratherthan to moralising, to ambiguity and mplication rather than todirect statement, to the conscious shaping and crafting of a work17

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfof literature rather than to the discursive open form of theVictorian novel. (Clarke n/d: 28)Despite having been forgotten by the so called Victorianstudies, Margaret Oliphant’s capacity to create a knowable communityin Chronicles of Carlingford and to represent herself allows me to statethat this is the moment for a further step towardsa new reappreciation.A re-appreciation that started in the 40s of last centurywith an incipient biography by Lucy Poates Stebbins, an Americanreviewer, who nonetheless placed the novelist as one of the four majorVictorian women novelists. Reinscribing the novelist’s work in thenineteenth-century paradigms of low cultural production and writtenunder the influence of the intellectual environment of the first decadesof the twentieth century, the first biographies of Margaret Oliphantcomposed a story of disillusions and hardships.Following this trend, in 1966 the American critics Vineta andRobert Colby published The Equivocal Virtue, Margaret Oliphant andthe Victorian Literary Market, launching Margaret Oliphant’srediscovery. They described her life as the product of the Victorianliterary market and viewed her literature as a commodity or an industrythat enabled good quality of life for her and for her enlarged family.More than a novelist, the critics acknowledged her talent as a historianof literature, representing the cultivated taste of the epoch. MargaretOliphant’s scholarship knew greater development with Q. D. Leavis’scrucial prefaces to Miss Marjoribansks (1969) and to TheAutobiography and Letters (1974).Until then the tradition of comparing George Eliot withMargaret Oliphant concentrated on the minor quality of the latter.George Eliot, as the only woman writer, along with Jane Austen, to be18

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfadmitted into what Frank Raymond Leavis called ‘the great tradition’,became the paradigm for the discussion of the feminine experience,becoming the measure by which all women writers were judged.In my opinion, Margaret Oliphant’s career presents analternative lesson. Her first articles, better paid than fiction, were onlypossible due to her success as a novelist; therefore, I consider that thepattern of Margaret Oliphant’s life makes more sense when comparedwith another prolific writer: Anthony Trollope. Like Trollope, MargaretOliphant needed time to find her own voice as a novelist; they bothstarted with regional novels, they both rehearsed the historical noveland both their careers met success when they appropriated an imaginedEnglish community and produced a series of chronicles. Like Trollope,Margaret Oliphant admired Jane Austen’s fine humour and rejectedDickens’s sentimentalism and pathos. They both produced volumes oftales, biographies, and acknowledged the Victorian appetite forliterature of travel. They both suffered because their work wasdiscussed not for its quality but for its quantity. Like Trollope,Margaret Oliphant opened the closed structure of the novel, questioningthe literary stereotypes, driving the novel away from its origins andsurprising the reader: the temperament and will of the femininecharacters were determining factors.A central issue in Q. D. Leavis’s re-appreciation was thechallenge of tradition and the questioning of the Victorian conventionsshe perceived in Margaret Oliphant’s work. Despite being conservative,the novelist had a vision of the world which was contrary to the spiritof the epoch. In the choir of the Victorian writers, her voice wasdifferent, gaining for herself the epithet of “an exceptionally prolific19

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfand accomplished writer in the highly competitive market of theVictorian literature’s golden age” (Jay 1995: 1).From the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards,Margaret Oliphant deserved a different kind of appreciation framed bya feminist agenda. She was then considered a writer that was able tosubvert the Victorian conventions and to create feminine charactersthat, although seeming to conform to these conventions, would defythem.The illuminating words of Q. D. Leavis in the above mentionedprefaces, of Merryn Williams’s in Margaret Oliphant: A CriticalBiography (1986), and of Elizabeth Jay’s in Mrs. Oliphant, A Fiction toHerself – A Literary Life (1995) turned the tide and Oliphant’s literaryfortune.Leavis considered Margaret Oliphant an intelligent literarycritic and an exemplary woman of letters, Merryn Williams, framed bya feminist perspective, placed the novelist in the first line of thenineteenth-century novelists and read Oliphant’s novels 11 as therepresentation of the novelist’s position regarding the role of women,and Jay offered a fundamental tool for the understanding of theAutobiography, a fictionalization of the self in her opinion.These three women helped to rescue the novelist “from a longspell of oblivion” (Dinnage 2004: 243), discarding previousappreciations of minority. They revised the positions of thepredecessors and set the main conditions for scholarship. In fact, theyopened the path for many and diverse studies on Oliphant, whichmotivated, for example, the working session of the Midwest Modern11 The Lady Lindores (1883), A Country Gentleman and His Family (1886), Kirsteen(1890) The Marriage of Elinor (1892).20

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfLanguage Association Conference in 1995, 12 as well as somecelebratory conferences in 1997 throughout Europe and America, 13from which resulted books and journal volumes dedicated toOliphant, 14 besides the scholarly articles, chapters and PhDdissertations already referred to 15 .The introduction to the A&L published in 1974 by Q.D.Leaviswas indeed a key moment in the reconsideration of the novelist as anoriginal mind, a novelist on a par with Charlotte Brontë, George Sandand George Eliot, in Leavis’s opinion. The variety and longevity ofMargaret Oliphant’s career makes us reconsider the terms under whicha writer is conferred a major or minor status, especially when she iscompared with George Eliot, oftentimes granted a paradigmatic placeof feminine writing and classified as a myth of progress (Jay 1995).Jay (1995) proposes that we place Margaret Oliphant’s careernot against the monolithic figure of George Eliot, who refused to readcontemporary fiction because she was afraid of being influenced, butrather in the same line of development of such writers as AnitaBrookner and Penelope Fitzgerald, among others, for whom literarycriticism was not understood as financial penalty for their minority butas an integral part of what fed their creative talent.As far as the role of literary critic is concerned, Q. D. Leavisclaimed that the extent and originality of Margaret Oliphant’scontribution was much better than George Eliot’s. Her degree oforiginality was a consequence of her experience of life – Margaret12 cf Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive. edited by D.J. Trela.13 University of St. Andrews, University of Évora, University of Oxford; Universityof Chicago14 cf. Women’s Writing, 6:2, 1999.15 My research undertaken at the British Library and at Senate House, University ofLondon has returned 161 titles.21

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfOliphant wrote about the life she knew, dramatizing the role of womenin a society dominated by men, and conceiving her heroines asintelligent, articulate and hard working, as well as magnanimous andtolerant.As Clarke explains,[b]ut the consensus of opinion was that her strength was to befound in domestic realism, in the portrayal of quiet, undramaticlife in small towns, Scottish or English, with a concentration onmiddle-class life and people, especially women, of middle age,who show the sobering effects of their hard experience (n/d:25).The tension between life and work is, in my opinion, MargaretOliphant’s literary signature. According to Jay (1995), the novelist wasone of the first women writers to explore her own life in the terms thefeminist critique was formed: working conditions, need forlegitimization as a writer, tendency to compare with other womennovelists and the notion that women’s perspectives were alwaysconsidered more fragmentary. Notwithstanding and paradoxically,critics recognize that despite this political position in the fictionalrepresentation of women and of herself in the Autobiography,Oliphant’s unequivocal conservative positions almost until the end ofher life, as spokeswoman of the also conservative Blackwood’sMagazine, did not allow her to help in the construction of the feministparadigms and agenda.In fact,[w]hile she frequently expressed conventional opinions andsaw Jude the Obscure as an attack on marriage, sheconsistently portrayed women in her own novels as beingthe stronger vessels who made the decisions, held theirfamilies together and shouldered the burdens.(Haythornthwaite 1990: 87)22

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfBut if in Blackwood’s Margaret Oliphant echoed theconservative wing of the editors, trying to transmit, through what somecall a persona, the idea that she was a man behind the anonymouswriting, when she collaborated with the Edinburgh Review shemanaged to reveal her feminine voice and she became an infalliblebarometer of the tastes and interests of her contemporaries.Elizabeth Jay’s restoration of the complete text of MargaretOliphant’s Autobiography in 1990 16 was another important step in thenovelist’s reconsideration: it enables us to have a full and a betterunderstanding of the distinctive and individual tone that underlies muchof Oliphant’s work (Jay 1990), as we shall see in chapters II and III.Refusing to follow the chronological perspective used by the firsteditors of the posthumous edition of the Autobiography, Jay proposes areading that deals with the cyclical rhythm of women’s life.Margaret Oliphant’s role of critic and essayist has also deservedthe attention of critics that concur in the argument, as I have alreadymentioned, that the voracious reading of foreign authors gave the writera more cosmopolitan vision of English affairs. The intellectualinsatiability that made her read everything that was published, fiction ornonfiction, in book or in periodical form, in Britain, in the Continent oreven in America, helped her to educate her taste and to write. She wasable to evaluate the European cultural and literary panorama, mouldingmany of the cultural patterns, showing a firm certainty of herself and ofher opinions, as can be read in a letter to the editor written in 1873:(...) I can only review books at all on the condition that Iexpress my own feelings in respect to them. It is of course inyour power to bid me refrain from reviewing any particularbook or any books at all, but I can only say what I think and not16 From now on all references to this book will be as A.23

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfwhat other people think, whatever the universities may say, Iread every word of both books mentioned, to my pain andsorrow (…) The tremendous applause which has greeted thisperformance is a good specimen of the sort of thing which I amanxious to struggle against - the fictitious reputation got up bymen who happen to be ‘remembered at the universities’, andwho have many connections among literary men. (A&L: 240-241)Accepting Macmillan’s proposal to write a volume on Italianpoets, she wrote between 1876 and 1895 a set of books on three Italiancities: The Makers of Florence: Dante, Giotto, Savonarola and theircity (1876) – where she surveyed cultural history with a series ofsketched biographies; The Makers of Venice: doges, conquerors,painters, and men of letters (1887) – representing the non-democratichistory of the city; and The Makers of Rome: in four books (1895) – adepiction of the early Church by means of the representation of thewealthy, educated and well-positioned matrons of Rome, whoinfluenced the form of piety in the fourth-century Roman Empire andof the first Popes.These texts about the Continental cultural history gave voice toher own critical perspectives on the Victorian ideology, negotiating aplace for her literary talent and self-projection. In them Oliphantrevealed her skills to describe the human stories in all their dimensionsand the common issues of life as she proclaimed in her Autobiography.She revealed her mastery in articulating the common stories with thegreat moments in the making of a nation. The 40 years as a reviewerand the chronicling of almost one and a half century of English LiteraryHistory 17 “had developed in her a fine sense of the vagaries of literary17 A Literary History of England from 1760 to 1825 (1882) and the Victorian Age ofEnglish Literature (1892).24

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selffashion” (Jay 1999: 159). As a literary critic, Margaret Oliphant wasthe representative of the literate, cultivated, well-informed andconservative middle- class.The efforts to rehabilitate her reputation reveal how rich andfull her work and her life were and hence how interesting. In fact, themultiplicity of ideological, political and cultural positions that sheenacted are the story of her life and writing: she wrote subversivestories on the margins of the dominant culture, she fictionalized herown life and the lives of her feminine characters within an apparentconformity and an implicit subversion, writing and re-writing thetraditional roles of women in society. Margaret Oliphant subverted thestereotypes when, complying with her editors’ orientations and criteriaof censorship, she appropriated a masculine voice to discuss questionsof the feminine sphere, or used cliché themes and plot to show adistinct vision of life.As Josephine Haythornthwaite wrote:In her published statements she expressed acceptance of,and approval for, the status and role of women in Victoriansociety, and opposition to any change in this. However, hernovels consistently display a very different view based onher own experience of life, a view totally at odds with whatshe believed she ought to think, and perhaps, what shethought was congenial to her readers. (1988: 37)Despite claims of neglect and the fierce attacks made by theliterary elite of the beginning of the twentieth century, critics haveunderstood the writer’s central role in culture. Sanders (1986), forexample, considers the writer a respected figure in the English letters,who, in her essays and in her novels, led the opinion of women on thegreat controversies of the time: the role of women in public life and inreligion and the relation between professional fulfilment, vocation and25

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfpersonal value.Moreover, one cannot disregard the fact thatOliphant’s achievements in rendering individuals and ideascomprehensible, not only to her contemporaries but to modernreaders, would be impressive under any circumstances. That sheachieved what she did within that “limited orbit” open toVictorian “feminine critic” is extraordinary. (Solveig 2005: 216)Many critics recognize that Margaret Oliphant was well aheadof her time in terms of social, religious and domestic representation, byrevealing her scepticism towards consolation by faith or by domestichappiness. The divergent critical fortune has been the pathos and theethos of Oliphant’s life: she had always been able to be a professionalwoman of letters, sometimes only with a bed of one’s own (Jay 2009)to write, and also a mother, a breadwinner, teaching us the lesson of themultifaceted and multifarious tasks a woman has to be able to perform.Her life and career tell a story of entanglement between private andpublic stages. And the efforts to establish a serious academicscholarship, which started in the 1980s, seem now to be settled asMargaret Oliphant has been accepted as an important Victorian writerwho seems to be joining the canon.The critical fortune of the AutobiographyMargaret Oliphant has always been appreciated as the exampleof the Victorian woman that “challenged the social conditions thatfaced women as both mothers and professional writers”, whose pathosgenerated “the tensions among maternal responsibility, creativity, andmaking living” (Blair 2007: 121).When it was published in 1899, the Autobiography wasreceived as an epic of domesticity, essentially the story of a typical26

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfwoman of mid-nineteenth century as can be read in The Academy(Anonymous 1899b). The tone and seriousness of such notable volume(Anonymous 1899a) denote the mind and the heart of the writer. TheQuarterly Review reads:We have here the personal note in perfection, the elementwhich, in spite of critics old and new, we hold to be as essentialto literature as to life. The gentler tone, the more intime voice ofan original and high-minded character, in the exercise of thetrade of reviewing, article-writing, and even – in a few cases –book-making, shows that professionalism in writing may bereduced to a minimum. Mrs. Oliphant’s mental and mortalindependence helped to free literature from conventionality, andher ‘Autobiography’ sets the seal on her example. (Anonymous1899c: 255-256)The Edinburgh Review, a propos of the edition of theAutobiography, published an anonymous article (1899a) whichclassified Margaret Oliphant’s work as nothing else but goodjournalism, whereas another article in The Pall Mall Gazette (1899d)claimed that the fragmentary Autobiography was an interestingdocument, but wrote a story of failure, a tragedy of happiness.Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf, who so strongly disclaimedMargaret Oliphant’s literary quality in fiction, acknowledged MargaretOliphant’s artistic sacrifice due to subsistence needs. Stephen used theAutobiography to illustrate the dilemmas of sacrificing duty to art,although honouring Margaret Oliphant’s choice:Mrs. Oliphant thought (and, as I believe, with some justice)that, if freed from pecuniary pressure, she could have rivalledsome more successful authors, and possibly have written anovel fit to stand on the same self with Adam Bede. Sheresigned her chance of such fame because she wished to sendher sons to Eton. It is of course clear enough that, if she hadsent them to some humbler school, she might have come nearerto combining the two aims, and have kept her family without27

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfsacrificing her talents to over-production. But, granting theforce of the dilemma, I confess that I honour rather than blamethe choice. I take it to be better for a parent to do his (or her)duty than to sacrifice the duty to “art” or the demands ofposterity. (Stephen 1899: 741)Virginia Woolf repeated the same argument in 1938. Sheappreciated the Autobiography, considering it an illuminatingdocument, a truly genuine and moving work and despite what she hadwritten about Margaret Oliphant’s place in the English Letters, as seenabove, she acknowledged that the novelist’s choice had to be applaudedand her courage admired.In the preface to the 1990 edition of the complete text of TheAutobiography of Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Jay argues for theliterary artefact of the Autobiography and considers that thefragmentary dislocations of the text were an experience in the narrativestrategy. The different fragments tell different moments, private andpublic, of the novelist’s life, in a purposeful ambiguity between, on theone hand, writing what she wanted and, on the other hand, submittingto the masculine paradigms of the autobiographical genre, revealing inher self-representation the double articulation in her process of writing:representing her emotions and feelings, along with the establishedconventions. No matter how intense her intimate moments of pain wereafter the death of her three children (Maggie, in 1864, at the age of 10,Cyril in 1890 at the age of 33 and Cecco in 1894 at the age of 34), theywere mixed with more public remembrances of the self-consciousnessof the professional writer that was looking for the most appropriateform to write her autobiography.For Jay, to become conscious of unvalued moments ofhappiness and to recreate the impulses and the needs that underpinned28

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfher life was the only possible way of self-definition. The deliberateprivileging of domestic memories and intimate friendships, against themyths of progress obtained in the public arena, the favourite tone of thecoeval masculine autobiographies, build the core of MargaretOliphant’s work.Strongly criticizing the editors of the first edition of theAutobiography (Denny Oliphant and Annie Coghill), because they wereunable to recognize Margaret Oliphant’s agony in keeping livingdeprived of all that was interesting for her, Elizabeth Jay claims that there-arranging of the narrative according to traditional memoirs gave avery inadequate image of Margaret Oliphant. Omitting more intimatepassages of the manuscripts, the editors built the image they deemedMargaret Oliphant would have liked to have. The way these editorsdealt with the fragments of the Autobiography is a sign of how easilyMargaret Oliphant’s work might have been interpreted as minor, awork responding to the needs of the Victorian literary market. Torestore the complete text allowed the modern reader to have a fullerperception of “the distinctive timbre of the individual voice which ranthrough much of her work” (Jay 1990: xvii).Elaine Showalter (1978) also considers the Autobiography avery unusual experience within the formal paradigms of the genre sinceit is a profound revelation of Margaret Oliphant’s self, a self-revelationproduced against the masculine canon that emphasized the conquests inthe public realm. The moral and mental independence of MargaretOliphant helped hence, in Showalter’s view, to free literature fromconventionality. A different position is expressed by Linda Peterson(1979), who claimed that any autobiography, Margaret Oliphant’sincluded, aims at a reading public and thus the study of29

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfautobiographical texts must be done not only taking into account thatthese are processes of self-knowledge, of dialogue between the presentand the past self, but also that they are public acts:In the first place, one of the work’s primary concerns is theaudience’s view of the autobiographer – that is, the public’sestimate of Mrs. Oliphant’s achievement as a literary artist. Tomost Victorians Mrs. Oliphant was known as a prolific butdecidedly second-rate writer. But by showing another side ofher life, the Autobiography attempts to question if not thevalidity at the least the completeness of that view. (Peterson1979: 159)Peterson argues that Margaret Oliphant’s target reader was herson Cecco, which, to a certain extent, accounted for her difficulty inrepresenting herself as a professional writer. To enunciate herself as anartist and to suggest that that role was natural to her was to betray herown lifestyle that privileged the private sphere of the family. In fact, asPeterson) writes (1979, the main objective of the Autobiography wasthe definition of the relation between the roles of mother and of artistand not the separation of the two.Gabriele Helms defines Margaret Oliphant’s style asmanipulative. In her opinion, the control and manipulation of thewriting are obvious in the end of the Autobiography, an end that shedeems dislocated:Cecco’s death occurs and is acknowledged by Oliphant muchearlier but does not result in her inability to write at that point;rather, this inability is displaced into the narrative chronologywhen her story has caught up with the present. Like her claimsto inability throughout the autobiography which I have read asexpressions of unwillingness, the way Oliphant constructs theend of her life story could similarly be read as a gesture ofcontrol. She can no longer write because she no longer wants towrite autobiographically. Oliphant does not close with aresolution of her life, its tensions, and dilemmas; rather closure30

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfhas only been achieved as far as her autobiographical self isconcerned. The ending reminds the reader that theautobiographer is in control of her written life and that while anautobiography always presents a textual life, the writer still hasone that exists or continues beyond the last line. (Helms 1996:87)Unlike all that has been written about the end of theAutobiography, Gabrielle Helms claims that the end is a reflection ofthe loss of the novelist’s family roots – her children and husband werealready dead – and consequently she had no interest in constructing apublic image. To write autobiographically implies, in Helms’ opinion, apersonal risk in the moment of writing and in the moment of reading.Therefore, to finish the Autobiography was an act of self-preservation.The act of remembering, combining emotions and selfreflections,is an act of choice which results from memory, throughwhich the meaning of certain events are postulated only afterwards, inthe exact moment when they are remembered. There is an intimateconnection between the past, the story of life and the present of thewriting. This tripartite connection is proved by the constant changes inthe Autobiography between the narrative of the past and the presentmoment, stressing that memories are not objective representations ofthe past.As Gabrielle Helms argues:Oliphant recognizes not only that the memories of her life, anylife, are discontinuous but also that meaning is ascribed to themlong after the actual events took place, actually not until themoment they are remembered. The consequence of thisrealization is that the past, the story of her life as she narrates it,and the present, the time of remembering/writing and ofwatching herself writing – and watching herself watching –cannot be separated because one cannot exist without the other.The frequent shifts between past and present emphasize thatmemories are not objective representations of past events that31

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfcan easily be retrieved; the process of remembering the pastconstructs the past, which makes recalling those recollectionsinto a ‘fictitious sort of thing’. (1996:82)The assertion that the construction of the past is done byactivating memories and that the subject of the text is hypothetical andtranscendental (Sturrock 1993) makes sense in the approach Helmsmakes to the Autobiography, because the relation the novelistestablishes between herself and her memory is, in my opinion, therelation of the creator and of the creation, in the process of giving lifeto those fictitious memories.My opinion follows Philip Davis’s argument:(…) the very thing which makes the life more accessiblethrough the words - namely the skill of a practised writer evenin dealing with himself - is just what prevents a reader beingquite sure what it is that is being made accessible. The fact ofthese people being writers may have affected not only the waythey lived their lives but also the way they remembered andwrote about them. The writing talent was indeed a part of theirlives; what one cannot tell is how far it is being used in anautobiography, intentionally or unintentionally, to subordinatethe other parts of the life to a style accepted as the writer’s own.For the medium in which the life is written is the medium inwhich the work was done, and the writing of the life may beonly another form of work. (1983:248)The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant is a text full ofparadoxes and duplicities; it is a double-voiced discourse, becoming atestimony in the incessant search for the processes that gave origin to it(Helms 1996).The duplicity of voices and of layers of meaning encompassesthe mode Margaret Oliphant understood her public and privateexistence. Seeming to write with a firm purpose in mind almost untilhalf way through the text, she was simultaneously looking for an32

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfexplanation of herself in the process of writing. Refusing to be theultimate authority regarding something she was not in fact able to fullyrepresent (Birrento 1999), Margaret Oliphant denounced the masculineconvention as wrong, becoming herself an authoritative figure, with anindividual and original perspective, showing her creativity through atransgressive discourse (Foucault 1984a).Denying the canonical elements of the autobiographical genre –to tell the story from birth to adulthood, putting the professional life atthe centre of the narrative – Margaret Oliphant demystified theestablished order of the self, telling a different story. HerAutobiography balances between her conflicting reality of being amother and a writer, between maternity and literature; as narrator of herown story, Margaret Oliphant looks for a structure that imitates thehesitations and changes of her objectives:I am particularly interested in Oliphant’s role as a narrator ofher own life, as I recognize that her self is largely a deliberatecreation. Oliphant’s frequent self-reflexive and metanarrativecomments indicates her pronounced self-consciousness andfurther suggest that she not only writes with an audience inmind first her sons and later the public but that she is always herown first reader. (Helms 1996: 88)Philip Davis also refers to the connection between novel writingand life writing, giving as an example, among others, MargaretOliphant’s Autobiography. He explains that autobiography, a highlyappreciated genre in the nineteenth century, is essentially false, addingabout Margaret Oliphant:(…) her professional command shows how she has been able towrite her autobiography precisely by not using her life andmemory as she could have used in writing fiction. With all theskill of a novelist herself, as well as with the prosaic ruefulnessof a disappointed author, she writes autobiography as if it were33

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfan anti-novel (1983: 276).The dominion of the writing and of the style is an issue alsoraised by Valerie Sanders (1989), who argues that autobiographies ofwomen novelists are interesting case studies. Firstly, becauseprofessional life has given them the opportunity to narrate feminineexperiences within the limits imposed by society, namely what is or isnot accepted to be published. Secondly, because women novelistsdominate the conditions of omniscience, said otherwise, they knowhow to enter the characters’ mind and how to manipulate it:Faced with her professional knowledge of fiction-writing, theautobiographer approached the construction of her own lifestorywith an acute awareness of its difficulties. The question ofemphasis, of what to omit or include in the shaping of her tale,was perhaps the largest problem, closely followed by choice ofstyle. Too much attention to her professional life (…) wouldmake the author look conceited, while too much attention to herprivate life would violate the sacred notions of decency.(Sanders 1989: 76)Basing herself on the opposition between public and private,where one does not superimpose the other, where the little tale ofevents and the narrowest domestic record are as important as thehistory of a nation, Laurie Langbauer states:(…) by recognizing the importance of the commonplace in herown, and other’s autobiographies, Oliphant has formed a theoryof history to herself, one that adds to the most recent debate onthe subject. Oliphant’s emphasis that the everyday is exactlywhat we are unable to recognize or make out suggests thatshifting our larger historical record to the subjects’ relation totheir daily lives will give us no more access to historical truththan our earlier attention to great events. (1995:132)The connection of the banal and trivial with History revolvesaround the question of the creation of a self, of the intimate relation34

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfbetween the quotidian and the ways human beings become what theinstitutions and the nations name subjects.Despite the divergent opinions about the merit of her work, we,readers and critics of the twenty-first century, should have no doubtsregarding Margaret Oliphant’s substantial and significant contributionto the Victorian cultural and literary panorama. During the time Idedicated to this research I have oftentimes asked myself whether ornot it was worth working on this woman and which would be mystarting point, as I was not interested in reducing her to a phenomenonof the cultural history of the Victorian times. As Elizabeth Jay claims,Margaret Oliphant “was not merely a product of her culture, but shehad a greater hand than almost any other contemporary novelist informing the standards of that market” (1995: 4). As a woman aware ofthe rules and conventions of her time, she was simultaneously the“creation and creator of the social milieu in which she moved” (Jay1995: 4).Having in Blackwood’s an ample stage to express heropinions, 18 her fictional, biographical, historical, and topographicalwritings and literary criticism root Margaret Oliphant in a broaderframework of people and places, and enable us to consider her as oneof the powerful voices of the Victorian period. But Margaret Oliphanthas suffered for having produced too much. Having lived a life full ofpeople and of travels, she wrote continuously out of financial necessityand constraints; hers was a life of infinite pain and labour. Definingherself like a breadwinner, she had always provided for her extended18 She also published with Cornhill Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, TheContemporary Review, The Fortnightly Review and Macmillan’s.35

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selffamily's needs to the detriment, according to some critics, of herreputation.The struggle to find a balance between her private and publiclife and image is the theme of the following chapters, where theAutobiography will be read against a critical apparatus rooted inquestions of identity, discourse and representation which articulatenarrative strategies that construct the story of a woman in a landscapeof the self.36

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfCONCLUSIONThe experience of life as a constant struggle and an expositionto all kinds of difficulties and disillusions gave Margaret Oliphant thenotion that a vaster conception of life, the experience of a whole way oflife, might have contributed to what others recognized as the minorquality of her writing, a criticism she did not accept easily, because shenotalways think such small beer of myself as I say, but alsobecause “[t]here is one thing, however, I have alwayswhimsically resented, and that is the contemptuouscompliments that for many years were the right thing to addressto me and to say of me (A&L: 131).In a double interrogation of the role of mother and of writer, MargaretOliphant qualified herself as mother, motherless, breadwinner and aproduction machine able to face everything, always fit to workwhatever happened, and simultaneously as a minor literary talent. Theassessment of the struggle that had always characterized her life to keepa balanced budget is manifested in a long reflexive incursion into theway she faced it:It was always a struggle to get safely through every year andmake my ends meet. Indeed I fear they never quite meet; therewas always a tugging together, which cost me a great deal ofwork and much anxiety. The wonder was that the much wasnever too much. I always managed it somehow, thank God!Very happy (and presuming a little on my privilege) when I sawthe way tolerably clear before me, and knew at the beginning ofthe year where the year’s income was to come from, butdriving, ploughing in, when I was not at all sure of that all thesame and in some miraculous way was getting through. If I hadnot had an unbroken health, and a spirit almost criminally153

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfelastic, I could not have done it. I ought to have been worn outby work, and crushed by care, half a hundred times by all rules,but I never was so. Good day and ill day, they balanced eachother, and I got on through year after year. This, I am afraid,sounds very much like a boast. (I was going to add, ‘but I don’tmean it as such’.) I am not very sure that I don’t mean it, or thatmy head might not be a little turned sometimes by a sense ofrashness and dare-devilness, if I may use such a word, of myown proceedings; and it was in its way an immoral, or at leastan un-moral, mode of life, dashing forward in the face of allobstacles and taking up all burdens with a kind of levity, as ifmy strength and resource could never fail. If they had failed, Ishould have been left in the direst bankruptcy; and I had noright to reckon upon being always delivered at the criticalmoment. I should think any one who did so blamable now. Ipersuaded myself then that I could not help it, that no better waywas practicable, and indeed did live by faith, whether it was orwas not exercised in a legitimate way. I might say now thatanother woman doing the same thing was tempting Providence.To tempt Providence or to trust God, which was it? In my owncase, naturally, I said the latter, and did not in the least deserve,in my temerity to be led and constantly rescued as I was. (A&L:128-129)As a consequence of this interrogation about herself as anautobiographical subject, Margaret Oliphant rejected the certainty ofamplitude and the singular perspective of the self. Constructing in herAutobiography a stage on which she reconstructed herself, by means ofdifferent discourses, Margaret Oliphant did not represent herself as asingular entity, but as a net of differences (Gilmore 1997) within whichthe subject was inscribed, in its multiplicity, heterogeneity and conflict.Creating a landscape of multiple and simultaneous experiencesMargaret Oliphant located herself in contradictory enunciativepositions. Positions or points of view that did not exclude each otherand that, used together, originated ways of thinking about the situation,ways of producing knowledge about what to do (Probyn 1993).154

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfThe different points of view she presented throughout the text,the several genre, from the personal lament 71 to meditation, to publicmemoir, to family anecdote and to travel narrative, all pertained to anessential form of the autobiographical objective of Margaret Oliphant:to define experiences of the self as a mother and as a writer.The Autobiography produces a textual multifarious landscape inwhich the representation of the feminine self reflects and/or contradictsa set of literary, artistic and social constructions of the feminine,demanding from the reader the consideration of both the limitations andthe possibilities of such feminine representation. Departing from aknown world of domestic experiences, on the one hand, and of theprofessional career, on the other, moving in such different realms likefamily, intimate and private circles and intellectual, literary and artistic,social and public spheres, Margaret Oliphant invented in theautobiographical representation a community of meanings, of feelingsand of experiences that only happen in the shared space of the text, thustriggering affective processes from the readers that recognize in thatspace a community of relations and a landscape of the self.Margaret Oliphant’s self, instituted as marginal, resisted anddiscovered her own way of representation. Decentring the dominant71 A lament due to the deaths in the family. We should not forget that all her sixchildren predeceased her. The first time she faced death was in 1854, when hermother died, followed by her second daughter, Marjorie, and of another son in 1855.In 1858 another son died, and in 1859 the same happened to her husband. 1864 was avery unhappy year in Margaret Oliphant’s life when her first-born daughter Maggiedied. “A graver era, God help me, but I did not know when I wrote the words that Iwas coming to my last sweetest hope, my brightest anticipations for the future, withmy darling, in her father’s grave. Oh this terrible, fatal, miserable Rome! I came hererich and happy, with my blooming daughter, my dear bright child, whose smiles andbrightness everybody noticed, and who was sweet as a little mother to her brothers(…) Four short days made all the difference, and now here I am with my boys thrownback again out of the light into the darkness, into the valley of the shadow of death.”.(A: 4); Cyril died in 1890 and Cecco in 1894.155

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfdiscourses and identities, she transformed their own meaning(Rutherford 1990) and presented the structures, the institutions and theknown relationships. Looking for new forms of description and selfrepresentation,Margaret Oliphant aimed to communicate theexperience of being a woman in a conflict that oscillated between twoimages and two spheres of experience. From these conflicts also arosethe construction of the autobiography as a conscious act, aimed at anaudience.Refusing to separate domesticity from profession, MargaretOliphant constructed her Autobiography as a landscape of the self.Breaking the distinction between the objective and the subjective, theprofessional and the personal, she validated the multiple feminineexperiences. The self represented in the Autobiography revealssimultaneously an entity composed by emotion and experience, it is aself that operates ontologically in several places: in the family, in thesocial circle of friendship, in the professional contacts, in the culturaland literary circle of the times. This insertion into different contextsconstitutes an order of different effects (Probyn 1993).By deliberately choosing to represent herself in different layers,Margaret Oliphant created a contradictory identity, multiple and intransformation, an identity composed by heterogeneous representationsof the feminine experience, transformed into consciousness as areaction to the masculine paradigms and the dominant discourse aboutthe feminine experience. Margaret Oliphant inscribed her feminineidentity in a writing process different in form and in content from themasculine, engaging the reader in that process like a collaborativecritic. To the extent that her self-representation defined her experiencein the process of creation of the Autobiography as a landscape of the156

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfself, she constructed an identity that articulates a politics of differencein a new circumstance (Rutherford 1990), defining in that landscape anew space for feminine identity represented by multiple rhythms andvoices.The emphasis put on the personal experience and identityenables the reader to understand that it is not possible to separate whatyou are from what you do and inscribes Margaret Oliphant in a criticalagenda that considers that what is personal is political, articulatingprivate experience with public domain and drawing maps ofidentification (Grossberg 1996).Existing in subjectivity, the autobiographical self is located inparticular positions that enable the different possibilities ofrepresentation of experience. Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography readsthe several worlds she inhabited – the personal, the social and theprofessional – recognizing, questioning and subverting the conventionsand the expectations, being also the way she had to read herself in acommon life, in the vicissitudes of human life, in the telling of thehuman story. The autobiographical creative act is transformed into anexploratory act of the experiential self and in the possibility ofpoliticizing that experience, becoming a text that constructs ideas andalternative forms about the nature of the social organization and of therelationships among people:(...) instead of referring back to the synthesis or the unifyingfunction of a subject, the various enunciative modalitiesmanifest his dispersions. To the various statuses, the varioussites, the various positions that he can occupy or be given whenmaking a discourse. To the discontinuity of the planes fromwhich he speaks. And if these planes are linked by a system ofrelations, this system is not established by the synthetic activityof a consciousness identical with itself, dumb and anterior to all157

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfspeech, but by the specificity of a discursive practice. (Foucault1972: 54)Margaret Oliphant used enunciative modalities that are semanticconstructions of the self, in the images of daughter, mother, wife andwriter. These images become enunciated subjects that epistemicallymodalize discourse, 72 envisaging a greater and better knowledge of herfragmentary self. But this knowledge, grounded on the episteme oftruth, is modalized by such auxiliary verbs as may and might and byadjuncts as perhaps, which imbue the text with a notion of narrativeand discursive fictionality.The frequent use of epistemic and deontic modality and ofadverbials of contrats and of concession allowed Margaret Oliphant tooperate, in her discursive formations, with alternative worlds orscenarios that create conditions of possibility for her selves, pointing toa possible world where things were as she would have liked them tohave been:To conceive of things being otherwise is to hold that they arereal or true in a world other than the actual one we are living inor that they are real or true in the actual world but at a momentin time other than the present. (Hoye 1997: 41)To create for herself conditions of possibility that do not belongto the real world, helped to politicize the image Margaret Oliphantwanted for herself, in an articulation between the realms of existenceand of experience The creation of these conditions of possibility in afictionalized landscape of the self allowed her to become an activeagent of change of the autobiographical paradigms, facing, challenging72 Cf. Rodney Huddleston.Introduction to the Grammar of English. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press 1984. The epistemic modality concerns the status of truthin the light of what the speaker knows; it is a modality oriented to a speaking subject,being thus a subjective modality.158

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfand resisting the ideological and cultural hegemonic structures of the19 th century.Rediscovering forms and contents, Margaret Oliphantconfronted the dialectics between conditions and consciousness,constructing possible contexts of experience, in a physical and mentalencounter with the events that were represented and interpreted. In theAutobiography, Margaret Oliphant represented life as it was,representing herself as a person with faults and qualities able to facedilemmas, tensions, conflicts, disillusions and pain, allowing, as Q. D.Leavis (1974) argued, no place for self-compassion. The moments ofapparent weakness, compassion and lament are always followed bymoments of assertion:(...) there is no self-pity in her work, as in Hardy’s tragic novels,nor any idealization or self-transfiguration, as in George Eliot’s.She was the opposite, too, of the bestseller novel-writer whopeddles day-dreams and wish-fulfilments. It is typical of herthat she wrote that “a ‘happy ending’ is simply a contemptibleexpedient” and this no doubt explains her inability to obtainfrom Victorian publishers, those shrewd judges of the marketvalues, high enough prices for even her best novels. (A&L: 27)This is the voice of a woman, of Scottish origin, whoexperienced the bohemian atmosphere of London and the artisticatmosphere of Italy. It is the voice of a woman who became acquaintedboth with a class of artists unacknowledged by the intellectuals and theelite and with some of the great names of the cultural and literaryVictorian scene. These acquaintances provided her a status with widerperspectives and fuller conceptions of life and art. The travels she madeprovided her with the knowledge of modern languages, which, in turn,provided her with access to other literatures and cultures, turning this159

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the SelfVictorian woman into an important and original case in the panoramaof the English letters of the 19th century.By privileging the epistemological and the ontological use ofexperience and the need to articulate the private and the public spheresof our life, the study of Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography enlightensthe questions connected with the literary and cultural critique of the textand with the conditions of plausibility.. Having a table for myself,unlike Margaret Oliphant, the activity of writing has been inevitablytouched by my different spheres of existence, in a tension and constantcontribution of the maternal, domestic and intellectual experiences. Thelines quoted below could have been written by me almost 120 yearsafter they were written by Margaret Oliphant:I used to write all the morning, getting up now and then in themiddle of a sentence to run downstairs and have a few wordswith him, or to play with the children when they came in fromtheir walk. (A&L: 44)Like Margaret Oliphant, the articulation of the experience of thetext with the recognition of my feminine voice, feelings and emotions,has revealed my ontological level in this moment of experience ofbeing a woman. It is a moment that, like a shock of recognition, asProbyn (1993) put it, has also revealed my epistemological level, theconditions of possibility for the categories of knowledge and hasallowed me to create my own landscape of the self, in an articulation offeelings and experiences and drawing maps of meaning for myprofessional and personal life.To read Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography andautobiographies in general as landscapes of the self is to understandthem as a canvas where the images of the self are represented. It is tounderstand autobiographies as a space of communication, where160

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfauthors and audience articulate meanings – where the audience has tomake sense of the identity of the author in a simultaneously producedand productive relationship, which is constitutive of communication asa social practice, and in which the audience has to understand to whomthe author is creating, why, how and when.I finish as I started, with Elspeth Probyn’s words:In acknowledging the very basic point that the experiential ispart of the critical enterprise itself, we move beyond theconstruction of experience as an object to be passively andimpersonally studied. In stating that the experiential is imbricatewithin a critical stance, we can begin to see how it mightprovide direction, and a ratifying sense of movement. It atteststo a clear point of departure, even as it is partial, in the sense ofbeing partial to (and part of) a political agenda. We are drawn torecognize and research certain experiences (as they arearticulated through gender, sexuality, class or race) because wehave at some level lived and experienced them ourselves.(Probyn 1993: 23)My critical and ideological stance allows me to agree that"[w]ithout being placed on a pedestal, experience can nonetheless giveus somewhere to speak from” (Probyn 1993: 26). It was from myexperience as a reader, an academic and a mother that I articulated myexperience, knowledge, gender and structure (Probyn 1993) and that Ispoke from, always based on a methodology that interconnects textsand the cultural and social practices they represent, in a dynamicprocess where culture does not rhyme with sepulture (Williams 1958).I started this work knowing that there are no given or availablestarting points; mine were traced based on my experiences andcontexts, knowing that “(...) in retrospect we can regard a beginning asthe point at which, in a given work, the writer departs from all otherworks” (Said 1975: 3). Learning Said’s lesson, my beginning161

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. The Story of a Woman, a Landscape of the Selfestablished “relationships with works already existing, relationships ofeither continuity or antagonism or some mixture of both” (1975:3),relationships that taught me to see (Williams 1961) and enabled me todevelop as a human being.162

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