Two on Oliphant

ELT 39:1 1996 characters . . . have only the one mind amongst them." In 1921, he open-mindedly discerns that Joyce is "the yet-unfoUowed master of what will be the next school." Orlans has accompanied Lawrence's critical works with careful introductions , detailed footnotes and excellent indices, as well as with a thorough biographical glossary of authors and correspondents relevant to Lawrence. There are few typos or other errors, although some readers wül find footnote 10 of chapter one (289), in which Orlans admits that he has lost the source and date of a letter from Graves to Lawrence, a bit odd. Only Orlans's bibliography is noticeably deficient, even quirky, in its omission of several recent serious works of literary criticism about Lawrence. There are not yet so many of these that the literary reader can afford to ignore them as Orlans does. By bringing most of Lawrence's literary commentaries together, Orlans enhances Lawrence's reputation as an outstanding writer and critic whose works and opinions, while original and independent, have much in common with the tastes of the transitional period. This volume helps make the case that Lawrence's works should be better known by the English literature professors who, despite Orlans's disdain for their profession, are likely to constitute the majority of readers and users of his book. Stephen E. Tabachnick _____________ The University of Oklahoma Two on Oliphant D. J. Trela, ed. Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive . Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1995. 190 pp. $49.95 Elisabeth Jay. Mrs. Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. 355 pp. $54.95 TWO IMPORTANT BOOKS devoted to Margaret Oliphant published in one year is a remarkable event. Margaret Oliphant (18281897 ) wrote 98 novels (41 after 1883), as well as hundreds of biographies, histories, articles, reviews, and short stories. When one attempts to write comprehensively about such a prolific author, the angle of the lens is necessarily so wide that inevitable distortion occurs. Those few who claim to have read all of her published work admit that this is a testimony to their endurance rather than to their achievement. Oliphant may well be fatal in large doses, but taken moderately, many readers have found intense pleasure in her fictional worlds and in her 130 BOOK REVIEWS autobiography. Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive , the first coUection of essays devoted exclusively to the works of Margaret Oliphant, shows evidence of this enjoyment while meeting a critical need. D. J. TYeIa has gathered together works by Oliphant scholars and literary critics which devote loving and meticulous attention to carefully selected aspects of her career. Trelas introduction stresses the need to reevaluate this author so long reviled by canonized novelists—Hardy for her dismissal of his Jude the Obscure on moral grounds, Woolf for her anti-feminist political views and her self-admitted pot-boüing, Oscar Wüde for her prattling about "curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things," Henry James for her lack of artistry, and by critics who accepted her self-assessment as a second-rate novelist whose first career was supporting and nurturing an extended famüy. John Stock Clark examines how the undervaluing of Oliphant began in the early twentieth century when the first assessments of Victorian literature were being made by literary historians. While not denying that Oliphant wrote quickly and sometimes carelessly, Clark shows how Oliphant undercuts stereotypes through her wit and irony, and views trivial incidents and commonplace characters (especially women) through unexpected perspectives, but with enlightened sympathy as well as her trademark disillusioned distance. Margarete Rubik, in The Subversion of Literary Clichés in Oliphants Fiction," shows how Oliphant constantly undercuts literary conventions : "Where [in Victorian fiction] would an orphan girl be presented not as lonely and unprotected, but as unpleasant and deceitful, yet instead of coming to grief be rewarded for her duplicity with a millionaire husband" but in Oliphant? Oliphant constantly undercuts the heroic and idealized view of life, denies the importance of romantic love, questions the happiness to be found in marriage, and offers readers "no tragedy, no pathos, no sentimental remorse," but only an ironically detached view...