The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant ed. by Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay (review)

Newly released in the Pickering Masters series are the first two parts of a planned six-part, twenty-five-volume Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant. Those familiar with Oliphant’s life and work will not be surprised that even in a collection that will eventually run to more than ten thousand pages, only a fraction of her titanic literary output will be reissued. But if the initial volumes are representative of the remainder of the project, VPR readers will want to encourage their libraries to purchase these first two parts and to place standing orders for the remainder, which are scheduled for release from mid-2013 through 2016. (The final volume will include a consolidated index, which in itself promises to be an invaluable aid to Oliphant scholarship.) The project is being overseen by general editors Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay, and individual volumes have been edited by them or by other recognized Oliphant scholars, many of whom are RSVP members. In addition to a comprehensive general introduction, chronology, and selected bibliography for the entire series (published in volume 1), each volume includes a volume-specific introduction and bibliography, introductions to Oliphant’s texts, and remarkably thorough and carefully edited endnotes.

Part I samples Oliphant’s literary criticism from its beginnings in 1854 through 1886 and also includes her retrospective, book-length appreciation of the literature of the era, The Victorian Age of English Literature, originally published in 1892. Part II completes the round-up of Oliphant’s literary criticism through the 1890s and presents a collection of her biographical and historical essays, many of which are long form. All texts in these first parts are reset from the original Victorian periodicals in which they appeared. Readers who have previously come to Oliphant through long hours of poring through dusty and crumbling volumes of Black-wood’s Edinburgh Magazine (or worse, peering painfully at reel after reel of microfilm), with the relevant volume of the Wellesley Index or a bibliography from an Oliphant biography held open with an elbow, will be amazed by how much more enjoyable her prose proves to be when it is served up so conveniently. The condensation of the long extracts characteristic of much Victorian reviewing also usefully streamlines the selected works (endnotes summarize omitted text and provide references to modern editions where available) so that it is possible to simply immerse oneself in the pleasures of Oliphant’s prose.

And what an immense and abundantly varied pleasure it is. Over her forty-some-year writing career, Oliphant engaged a very broad range of subjects. In the general introduction, Joanne Shattock explains that “literature,” for Oliphant, as for many of her contemporaries, “signified all subjects of interest to the educated or reasonably well informed reader of her day. . . . Biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, theology, collections of sermons, scientific writing and travel literature—all were grist to her mill” (1:xv). Oliphant’s best known periodical work (and also the largest body of it) was for Blackwood’s, but she also wrote for the Contemporary Review, Cornhill, Edinburgh Review, Spectator, Fraser’s, Longman’s, Macmillan’s, New Quarterly, New Review, St. Paul’s, St. James’s, Atalanta, Good Words, Graphic, and the American children’s magazine, St. Nicholas—as well as some others I have probably missed. The overwhelming number of Oliphant’s publications had a literary focus, mostly consisting of reviews of contemporary British literature but also continental literature and classics. (Representative essays on European literature and culture will be included in Part III of the series.) The second largest number of Oliphant’s essays focus on biography and autobiography, either reviews or biographical studies. However, in the introduction to volume 3, editor Valerie Sanders notes that one of the challenges of selecting pieces and...