Models of Authorship: Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot

Authors

Joanne Shattock

Date of this Version

2012

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 43 (2012)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

This article is about the profession of authorship in the nineteenth century. More specifically it is about the writing lives of two women novelists. Margaret Oliphant's (1828-1897) work is unfamiliar to most modem readers, apart from her Autobiography, one or two of her supernatural tales, and possibly the 'Chronicles of Carlingford', the series for which she was best known, novels and stories set in an English provincial town where life revolves around church and chapel. George Eliot (1819-1880) on the other hand, needs no introduction to today's readers.

In one of her many reviews of the works of her contemporaries, Margaret Oliphant referred wistfully to what she called 'the elysium of a popular edition',1 a compliment that was denied to her during her lifetime and afterwards. Remembering that she wrote a total of ninety-eight novels, fifty short stories, five full length biographies, three literary histories, historical guides to European cities, and more than three hundred journal articles, this may not seem in the least surprising. I and fourteen colleagues are currently engaged in a twenty-five volume edition of Oliphant’s Selected Works. I am hoping that an indirect outcome of what follows will be to show why we think the edition is important

My main focus, however, is on factors that determined the career of a professional author in the mid-nineteenth century, from apprenticeship and early publication, to the role of the publisher, and then to what I will call the publishing end game. I want to raise the question of whether there were perceived 'models' of a writing career, some possibly more highly regarded than others, and to what extent authors consciously or subconsciously, measured their own achievements against these models.

In 1885 the publisher William Blackwood sent Margaret Oliphant an inscribed copy of a long-awaited publication, the three volume biography of George Eliot by her widower John Walter Cross. As one of its longest-serving reviewers, and as a Blackwood author herself Oliphant could reasonably have expected to have reviewed the book for Blackwood's Magazine, but William Blackwood clearly thought otherwise. Oliphant seems not to have been put out. Writing to congratulate him on the publication she commented, 'I don't think anyone will like George Eliot better from this book, or even come nearer to her'. And then in another letter she added: 'It is quite astounding to see how little humour or vivacity she had in real life. Surely Mr. Cross must have cut out all the human parts'.' This was precisely what contemporary reviewers and readers were to say about the biography.