The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant

By Margaret Oliphant

1973

First Published

3.37

Average Rating

402

Number of Pages

12H16M

Audio Length

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.

Avg Rating

3.37

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

14%

4 STARS

30%

3 STARS

37%

2 STARS

16%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Margaret Oliphant

Author · 22 books

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.