Taking Oliphant Seriously: A Country Gentleman and his Family

Despite its apparently conventional form, despite its persistent working out of variations on the traditional marriage plot, and despite Margaret Oliphant’s excessive literary productivity, much of her work bends the dominant conventions of Victorian realist domestic fiction. Her self-conscious manipulation of conventional forms, like the Bildungsroman, significantly challenges reigning interpretations of Victorian realism, and points toward more radical formal changes that came with modernism. Focusing on one of her lesser known novels, A Country Gentleman and His Family, this essay examines how Oliphant both uses and modifies the dominant forms, largely by emphasizing the perspective of women inside conventionally male genres, challenging both moral and aesthetic assumptions.