The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant

by Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Oliphant, Elizabeth Jay (Editor)

After the death of Margaret Oliphant―the prolific nineteenth-century novelist, biographer, essayist, reviewer, and prominent voice on the “woman question”―two well-intending relatives took the autobiographical manuscripts she composed over a thirty-year period, and recomposed them to suit the model of a conventional memoir. In the process, they suppressed more than a quarter of the material. Based on the original manuscripts, the Broadview edition now makes available the missing text in its original order, and the restored Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant portrays a woman of scathing irony, anger, and grief. Part of Broadview’s Nineteenth-Century British Autobiographies series, this edition also includes extensive excerpts from Oliphant’s diaries.

Genres: Memoir, Classics, Victorian, Nonfiction, British Literature, Biography, Autobiography

221 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (née Margaret Oliphant Wilson) was a Scottish novelist and historical writer, who usually wrote as Mrs. Oliphant. Her fictional works encompass "domestic realism, the historical novel and tales of the supernatural".

Margaret Oliphant was born at Wallyford, near Musselburgh, East Lothian, and spent her childhood at Lasswade (near Dalkeith), Glasgow and Liverpool. As a girl, she constantly experimented with writing. In 1849 she had her first novel published: Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland which dealt with the Scottish Free Church movement. It was followed by Caleb Field in 1851, the year in which she met the publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh and was invited to contribute to the famous Blackwood's Magazine. The connection was to last for her whole lifetime, during which she contributed well over 100 articles, including, a critique of the character of Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Reviews

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best Quotes from The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant with page numbers (Broadview edition)

1. I may put the long musings of my agony into words, but Tennyson has done it already far better than I can. (pg 45)

2. Life though it is short, is very long, and contains so much. And one does not, to one's consciousness, change as one's outward appearance and capabilities do. (pg 47)

3. I may as well take the little satisfaction to myself, for nobody will give it to me. (pg 51)

4. I was horribly disappointed, and dropped down from untold heights of imagination to a reality I could not understand. (pg 64)

5. But there is always a prophetic ache in the heart when such calamity is on the way. (pg 68)

6. Alas—is it not yesterday? Life is full of dreadful repetitions. (pg 69)

7. And yet it is all true. Life was becoming an impossible thing. (pg 86)

8. I am a wonder to myself, a sort of machine, so little out of order, able to endure all things, always fit for work whatever has happened to me. (pg 96)

9. The anguish was great, but it was life—now this is death—no hope any more, no lifting, the blank deepening down, the immoveable darkness, the silence; which is worst I know not. I know not: this because this is present, this is what I now have to bear. (pg 99)

10. All failure, failure everything, and I am thought a successful woman, but everything I touch seems to go wrong. (pg 124)

11. We must go away, I think to London, though the London darkness rather frightens me. (pg 127)

12. This morning I said I was dead and felt nothing, now I am all wildly alive, suffering and aching and hardened in my sins, but of my mind not my body, my body is well, well, the horrible thing. (pg 130)

13. Not an original thought, perhaps, but curious as occurring at such a moment. (pg 141)

14. How one wonders vainly whether, if some one thing like this had not happened, the tenor of one's entire life might have been changed. (pg 152)

15. Ah me, alas! pain ever, for ever. This has been the ower-word of my life. And now it burst into the murmur of pain again. (pg 154)

16. I am not of the kind who do that usually, and perhaps when the trouble had been softened away I forgot even that I had done it; but thinking of it all years after, in the great and deep joy of knowing that the change I desired had come to pass, though without knowing what had led to it, I suddenly remembered how in my trouble I had sought her help, and it seemed to me like a flash of light upon the road by which we had come, not knowing. I have never asked any one else to do that for me. (pg 172)

17. There are some people who never get any credit for what is good in them, and some who get too much credit. (pg 173)

18. Oh, magic of life that made everything go smooth! they had taken no harm. They had their lives before them, and unbound possibilities of making everything right. (pg 176)

19. Grief is the strangest thing, or rather it is very wonderful in how many different ways people take those blows, which from outside seem as if they must be final. (pg 178)

20. I can hear myself saying "Cecco and I." It was the constant phrase. But all through he was getting weaker; and I knew it, and tried not to know. And here I am all alone. I cannot write any more. (pg 203)

[Will]

no star rating for this one; feels silly to compare it to the more conventionally structured books I've mostly read and reviewed on here. this is a fascinating document: an author brutally honest about her middling success and fears of being forgotten, grappling with the impossible grief that has come with outliving literally all of her children. parts were written before her last two sons died, parts were written after, so you as reader watch her go from "I am writing this so the boys have a record of me, and something to publish for a bit more money after I'm gone" to "everybody is gone and I'm alone; why am I still writing this?" there's a bubbling but never articulated frustration with her having had to use her writing to provide for her family her whole life, and the way this robbed her of any real shot at being a Great Artist in the vein of George Eliot or Charlotte Brontë. it's a tragic story about the desire not to be forgotten, and about the harsh realities of grief. written in part as a hyper-self-conscious attempt at autobiography and in part as private journal, it oscillates between modes, constantly shifting form. this gives us a more complete picture of oliphant's character than standard autobiography ever could. it's a jarring, difficult read; a shockingly honest look into another person's mind. I've never read anything like it.

[Amy Hetletvedt · Rating 3 out of 5]

600 pages of pride and obstinacy; 100 pages of humility and common sense. If you can slog through the first, the last is sweet. And I suppose a good reminder to apologize early.

[Zuzana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but so full of grief and sorrow as only a real life could be.

[Steph | bookedinsaigon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Margaret Oliphant, one of the most prolific writers of the Victorian era (she wrote, if I am correct, over 90 novels), approaches the writing of her autobiography in an almost modern, stream-of-consciousness way. Interspersed between more typical chronological narration are diary-like entries in which she lets her emotions shine through. The result is a unique, though perhaps difficult to swallow, look into the life of a woman whose dreams of relaxation and success were forever thwarted by money troubles, useless dependents, and tragic deaths.

[quasialidia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very very very sad.

[Mandy Mcallister · Rating 2 out of 5]

The grief filled ramblings of one of the most prolific Scottish female writers is stragely a tough read to stay awake for.