“We who have been bred upon Sir Walter”: Margaret Oliphant, Sir Walter Scott, and Women’s Literary History

“We who have been bred upon SirWalter”: Margaret Oliphant, SirWalter Scott, and Women’s Literary History Pam Perkins University of Manitoba A s a literary c r it ic , Margaret Oliphant was not easily impressed, even by the greatest of her contemporaries. Her publisher John Blackwood gently advised bringing a little more warmth to an evaluation of Dickens’ fiction published shortly after his death; her praise of George Eliot, a writer whom in general she admired highly, was also often qualified by doubts and reservations.1 If there was an author who came near to escaping such ambivalence it was not any of the great Victorians, but Oliphant’s countryman and predecessor, Sir Walter Scott. Even though she was not entirely uncritical when writing about him— she found his poetry rather facile and regretfully admitted that such late works as Count Robert and Castle Dangerous might have been better left unwritten2— Scott and his fiction seemed to exemplify, for Oliphant, the highest qualities that could be demanded of a writer. Indeed, in her three-volume Literary History of England 1790-1825 she identified Scott as one of the most significant con1 For John Blackwood’s letter about Dickens and a discussion of it, see Haythornthwaite 81-82. Peterson and D’ Albertis both discuss Oliphant’s responses to Eliot, their different emphases highlighting Oliphant’s ambivalence. 2 On the subject of Scott’s poetry, see The Literary History ofEngland, 1790-1825, 2; 113-118; on the late novels, see “Two Ladies” 209. ESC 30.2 (June 2004): 90-104 tributors to what she saw as the dramatic transformation of literature that took place over those thirty-five years, a judgment implicitly reinforced in her later history of Blackwood’s publishing house. Nor was Scott’s influ­ ence merely a matter of historical interest to Oliphant; he is as central to her imaginative writing as he is to her work as a literary historian. While her early Scottish tales arguably owe as much to such figures as John Galt and John Wilson as to Scott, and her most famous mature work is about English provincial life, her children’s books on Scottish history are steeped in Tales of a Grandfather and her 1890 novel Kirsteen recalls Scott on a number of levels. There is, of course, nothing less surprising than that a Scot of Oliphant’s generation would admire and be influenced by Sir Walter Scott. Yet given the way in which Scott was praised in his own life­ time and immediately afterwards for what was supposedly his powerfully masculine influence on fiction, Oliphant’s intense and continuing interest in his work is noteworthy. As a writer of both history and fiction, Oliphant demonstrates in her responses to Scott how women writers were able to make a place for themselves in a literary tradition in which even they saw men as the pre-eminent figures. In some ways, Scott poses obvious problems for a nineteenth-century woman attempting to write a literary history that makes room for her own work. While it is important not to oversimplify Scott’s reception, which has recently attracted detailed and sophisticated analysis, and while Scott himself freely and frequently admitted the influence of his women prede­ cessors and contemporaries, his novels were often sharply distinguished from the work of the mainly female novelists of the generation before and contemporary with him. The idea that with Scott “[t]he novel gained a new authority and prestige” as “it was no longer in danger of becoming the pre­ serve of the woman writer and the woman reader” has a fairly long history. While the phrases just quoted appear in the introduction to the Penguin edition of Waverley (first published in 1972), the sentiment is similar to views expressed by Scott’s first reviewers. As Ina Ferris has shown in her influential Achievement ofLiterary Authority (1991). early nineteenth-cen­ tury writing about Scott tended to present him as a “manly genius,” appeal­ ing to “readers as precisely not female readers (whatever their biological gender may be)” (81, 83)? Similarly, Ian Duncan states bluntly that Scott was the “personification of a new patriarchal dignity of authorship” and even points out...