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

Part 3 of the monumental Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant was released in 2013, and part 4 has just been published. Overseen by general editors Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay, individual volumes have been edited by them or by other recognized Oliphant scholars, many of whom are RSVP members. (NB: Parts 1 and 2 of this collection were reviewed in the Spring 2013 issue of Victorian Periodicals Review.) In addition to Shattock, volume editors for part 3 include Josie Billington, Muireann O’Cinneide, Merryn Williams, Valerie R. Sanders, and Joanne Wilkes. The series features a comprehensive general introduction, chronology, and selected bibliography for the entire series (published in volume 1); each individual volume also includes a volume-specific introduction and bibliography, introductions to each of the particular texts included in the volume, and remarkably thorough and carefully edited endnotes.

Part 3 completes the selections of Oliphant’s journalism, but it also contains a significant sampling of her shorter fiction and thus is intended to serve as a bridge to the remaining parts of the series, which will be given over to a selection of her novels. According to Shattock and Jay, part 3 “represents a cross-section of MOWO’s engagement with Victorian prose genres” while also being “illustrative of the developments and changes witnessed in a working life which covered almost the whole of the second part of the nineteenth century” (10:xiv). Volume 13, on life-writing and history, highlights Oliphant’s interests and achievements in biography, which John Blackwood described as “about the greatest of your many fortes” (qtd. in 10:xvi). It provides a range of essays that span Oliphant’s writings for Blackwood’s, notably omitting the Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II, which were published in volume form and therefore more generally accessible to modern readers.

Volume 14, on European literature and culture, illuminates how Oliphant parried her non-elite, mostly pragmatic education in European languages and literatures into becoming a guide for the increasingly monoglot “common reader” of the British middle classes. The volume editors, Sanders and Wilkes, note that the essays they selected largely present Oliphant’s responses to European literary texts rather than travel writing or other cultural surveys. What is noteworthy about these essays, they explain, is Oliphant’s “sheer capacity for the multi-faceted demands of this kind of reviewing, which began with persuading the Blackwoods of the need for overviews of European authors, and culminated in her confident grasp of at least two foreign languages (French and Italian), and an authoritative command of their literatures” (14:xxv). Although most of the selections in this volume are from Blackwood’s, there are also essays from the Cornhill Magazine, Edinburgh Review, and Contemporary Review.

The bulk of part 3, however, is given over to short-form fiction reprinted from Blackwood’s, Macmillan’s, Cornhill, St. James’s Gazette, and Longman’s. With the exception of the supernatural stories (which comprise volume 12), few of Oliphant’s novellas and short stories have been anthologized. As with all of Oliphant’s oeuvre, deciding what to include was clearly a challenge. O’Cinneide, in the introduction to volume 11, explains that while artistic success was the primary criterion, “it also seemed important to give a sense of the thematic range of MOWO’s shorter fiction, as well as its chronological and aesthetic development” (11:xiv). Readers who have enjoyed Oliphant’s longer works will be delighted to find so many of these shorter works published together in one place.