[In the following introduction to a new edition of Oliphant's Autobiography (based on the original manuscript), Jay suggests that this new work allows modern readers the chance to understand the intense relationship Oliphant felt between the act of writing and the personal and financial needs that inspired it.]

Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant, whose curious name derived from marrying a cousin on her mother's side of the family, was born on 4 April 1828 in Wallyford, Midlothian, and died in Wimbledon on 25 June 1897. Her first attempt at writing took the form of a novel written in her teens to secure 'some amusement and occupation for myself while striving to overcome depression after a broken engagement and acting as the silent nurse and attendant her mother's serious illness required. The image is prophetic. Over the next fifty years Oliphant was to write some ninety-eight novels, fifty or more short stories, more than four hundred articles, numerous travel books and several biographies, while functioning as the mainstay of a family whose ever-widening circle and increasingly importunate demands she satisfied and, on occasion, distanced by means of her literary career. The final lines of her autobiographical manuscript, written after the death in adulthood of her two remaining children, also focus attention upon the intimate and complex relationship between the writing and the need that generated it.

And now here I am all alone.
I cannot write any more.

Experience had discouraged her from seeking support and solace from men. Her father seems to have been a detached, uncompanionable figure, totally overshadowed by her capable mother, to whom she was devoted. Despite being nine years younger than either of her two brothers, Oliphant provided for her elder brother Frank and his children upon his bankruptcy and subsequent mental collapse, and for the exiled life of the younger brother 'Willie' who declined into chronic alcoholism. Her husband's death after only seven years of marriage left her abroad, in debt, and with the three of her six children who had survived infancy to support. It is difficult, even with the full text of her autobiography, to construct a full picture of her marriage to her cousin Frank, which had so brief a span to survive many of the strains normal to the early years of married life, when money was short, childbearing an almost annual event, and the new relationship had to be negotiated in a strange environment under the additional strain of her parents coming to London with the sole aim of being near her. The strong emotional tie that existed between mother and daughter seems to have been a source of irritation and jealousy to Frank, especially since the bond seemed to have been cemented by a sense of the inadequacy of all the male figures in the Wilson family. Frank had therefore to carve out for himself the roles of husband and father while also trying to establish himself in business as a stained-glass window artist. Frank's naïvety in business affairs was something Oliphant could probably have forgiven, but the wound that never completely healed was Frank's failure to share with her his medical specialist's grim diagnosis of advanced tuberculosis. In retrospect she blamed herself for lack of sympathy, but also contrasted his petulant self-absorption with the heroic fortitude of her mother during her final illness. Above all the lack of trust and concern hurt, and many an apparently happily married couple in Oliphant's novels is resolved into two individuals harbouring thoughts that would astound or grieve the other. Though she set her face firmly against remarriage, partly on account of her conviction of reunion in heaven, it is remarkable that in her moments of deepest grief she seems only to think of the children already taken from her and her mother's welcoming presence, not of her husband. As the years passed and friends and dependants unknown to Frank came into being it is scarcely to be wondered at that the tenth of her life spent in marriage receded in importance.

When two of Oliphant's former dependants, her niece Denny, and her distant cousin Annie Coghill, came to publish her autobiographical manuscript in 1899, they had become so accustomed to her shaping powers as family provider, professional writer and businesswoman that they were astonished and disappointed, for 'it had no beginning: scraps had been written at long intervals and by no means consecutively'. So they attempted to redeem their relative's startling lapse by assembling the 'bits' and 'fragments' of which Oliphant herself spoke, into the narrative line they believed would prove acceptable to the market.

Yet they could not escape the anxiety 'that the needful fitting together has not been quite smoothly done', that the manuscript displayed a certain obstinate resistance to the literary template they wished to impose upon it. The reordering and suppressions involved in their editorial process wrenched the form a step away from the autobiographical impulse that had engendered it and a step nearer to the biographical record expressly forbidden by Oliphant upon her death-bed. Moreover, in their desire to 'gratify the many readers who have for so long a stretch of years regarded her as a friend', these two women in effect colluded with the constraints imposed upon women and women writers by the cultural assumptions enshrined in the market. Such a generalized accusation requires more specific illustration. Here then is the portrait of Oliphant that Annie Coghill offered to readers before they embarked upon the truncated autobiography.

[W]hatever sufferings might be lying in wait to seize upon her solitary hours, there was almost always a pleasant welcome and talk of the very best to be found in her modest drawing-room. If the visitors were congenial, her charm of manner awoke, her simple fitness of speech clothed every subject with life and grace, her beautiful eyes shone (they never sparkled), and the spell of her exquisite womanliness made a charmed circle around her.

This blueprint for feminine behaviour stresses decorum and restraint, the ability to give life to the charmed circle without insisting upon her own presence as its creative force. The passage, with its culminating tribute to 'the very atmosphere about her which was "pure womanly",' constitutes the editors' hidden agenda. If Oliphant is to be presented as a social creature brought to life by her response to the needs of others, then the inner voice heard during those solitary hours, especially when raised against the demands imposed upon her by others, will have to be muted or altogether stifled.

The cuts that her editors made, which amounted to well over a quarter of the original manuscript, were of two sorts, though both might be seen to have their origin in their concern for this womanly image. There were small excisions of barbed comments, potentially embarrassing to the living, that seemed at odds with the qualities of charm and grace privileged in the prefatory account. The major and continuous portions of unpublished material, however, were all of a piece and written in each case immediately after the deaths in 1864, 1890 and 1864 of her three surviving children at the ages of 10, 33 and 34 respectively. These outpourings of grief, written in her 'solitary hours', form a painfully direct attempt to log the daily agony of recollection, desolation and theological speculation. They have no immediately imagined audience beyond God or her own consciousness; none the less they attain a literary stature beyond the purely personal. However intense the grief the cadences of her lucid style never deserted her and these journal intime passages share with the more public recollections the mark of the self-consciously professional writer feeling her way to appropriate form. At every stage of this diverse enterprise Oliphant compared her venture with the matter and mode revealed in the autobiographical literature that she read and reviewed. The process of recording her reactions to her daughter Maggie's death in the opening pages of the journal opened her eyes to the innovative nature of Tennyson's In Memoriam, which she had previously been inclined to judge harshly as a vehicle for philosophy rather than a spontaneous and bitter cry of pain (Blackwood's Magazine, February 1856). Now she recognized it as a model enabling the complex intertwining of reflection and emotion. Tennyson 'has done it already far better than I can', she wrote a few weeks after her daughter's death; nevertheless he had taught her how to 'put the long musings of my agony into words', and as she reread this section toward the end of her life she wondered whether it might not have its own place in the literature of bereavement.

It is important to make this point about the literariness of the Autobiography if only to dispel the long-held notion that this fragmented self-disclosure is merely a naïve compilation of diary, chronicle and anecdote, eliciting compassion for a series of personal tragedies. Even those among Oliphant's readers who had been comparably schooled in grief were impressed by the poignance with which this particular story was told. Virginia Woolf in the course of a polemical dismissal of Oliphant's novels as a kind of literary prostitution which 'smeared your mind and dejected your imagination' found herself surprised into the admission that the autobiography was, on the other hand, 'a most genuine and moving piece of work' (Three Guineas, 1938). Woolf had herself experienced the profoundly disturbing effects of the shockingly premature deaths of a mother, a step-sister and a brother. Moreover she had a standard of literary comparison in her father Leslie Stephen's intimate memoir of two marriages, compiled as a record for his children and known in the family as the Mausoleum Book. Although the praise 'most genuine' might seem to come uncomfortably close to the accusation of ingenuousness, the Autobiography is, after all, remembered as 'a piece of work', a literary artefact.

For the self that Oliphant presents in the Autobiography is a deliberate creation; accustomed as a novelist to examining her characters as they appeared both to themselves and to the outside world, this dual perspective emerges in the half-mocking way in which she views her relations with the world around her. Indeed one critic has sardonically described her picture of herself as a woman whose talent had been circumscribed by the demands of her family as 'one of her better fictional efforts', seeing in it a desire to disguise the fact that she was a competent professional writer who had achieved the limited best of which she was capable (W. Evans Mosier, Mosier, 'Mrs Oliphant's Literary Criticism', Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1967). The criticism misfires in confusing fiction with falsehood. There is a degree of deliberate self-marginalization in Oliphant's picture of herself as 'a fat, little commonplace woman, rather tongue-tied', living, half by choice and half by force of circumstance, a life remote from the literary coteries of London. This account ignores her friendship and acquaintance with many of the literary giants of her day, the fact that she frequented, if less frequently, the salons that were a source of inspiration to that intrepid social investigator, Henry James, and the type of wry confession found in a letter to her nephew Frank, telling him that although she did not particularly care for the way in which she had been 'made much of at a Balliol College ball, doubtless she would have cared had she not received this attention (27 June 1879, National Library of Scotland Acc. 5793/2). Her repeated assertions of social awkwardness neglect her considerable gifts as a hostess capable, for instance, of organizing an open-air party on the island of Runnymede on 19 June 1877 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of her connection with the publishing firm of Blackwoods, an event which in itself suggests a sense of her own worth in the creative partnership.

Her own concept of her self-effacing manner was markedly at odds with other people's assessments. James spoke of 'her sharp and handsome physiognomy'. Annie Thackeray, one of her closest friends, was forced to admit that she could be 'cold in manner and tart in speech', while J. M. Barrie, searching for the words in which to convey her combined simplicity and hauteur, described her as 'the grande dame at one moment, almost a girl, it might be, the next'.

Barrie's appreciation of the apparently contradictory elements in her nature may help us to appreciate the problems Oliphant encountered in her autobiographical writing. As she sought to transcribe her mother's character she realized the inadequacy of fictional tools for such a purpose.

How little one realises the character or individuality of those who are most near and dear. It is with difficulty even now that I can analyse or make a character of her. She herself is there, not any type or variety of humankind. (p. 21)

The ensuing picture of her mother does, in part, rely upon her novelist's sense of physical presence, setting and illustrative anecdote to illuminate a psychological portraiture, but there are abundant qualifications and a sense of the inefficacy of the many superlatives she employs to convey 'this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit' (V. Woolf, 'Modern Fiction', The Common Reader, 1925).

One reason for Woolf s involuntary praise of the Autobiography may have been that it most nearly approached the condition to which she believed that fiction should aspire, 'so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style'. Considered in the light of this paradigm it becomes possible to see the fragmentary dislocations of the Autobiography not merely as accidents of protracted composition, but as an experiment in narrative strategy.

While writing the first portion of the Autobiography in 1864 Oliphant had been reading Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë and had concluded that, although her own novels might not have the emotional strength of Brontë's, yet she knew herself to have a 'fuller conception of life'. She recognized that 'the love between men and women, the marrying and giving in marriage, occupy in fact, so small a portion of either existence or thought', but market forces and crushing domestic financial problems contrived to prevent her fully exploiting this vision in her fiction. In her personal writing, however, she was free to strive for a mode compatible with the sense that her life did not fall into conventional rhetorical patterns. An innate elasticity of temperament, she ruefully lamented, meant that her life must always fall short of the dignity of tragedy. As a professional critic she became increasingly interested in the autobiographical and biographical genres (biography was to become her own preferred literary mode) and her second major bout of self-inscription was prompted by her dissatisfaction with two accounts of the lives of fellow writers that had recently appeared: J. W. Cross's Life of George Eliot (1883) and Anthony Trollope's posthumously published Autobiography (1883). Both records shocked her by the way in which the animus of the life had been, or was represented as having been, committed to or shaped by the demands of the writer's art. Her own energies, she felt, as she deconstructed her life, had been more widely dispersed.

Read against recent scholarship on the autobiographical genre prompted by gender studies, Oliphant's case is peculiarly interesting. She felt herself precluded from the domestic and professional advantages accorded to male writers, whose sense of progress and achievement could be measured in attaining such public goals as secure editorial positions. Yet when she compared herself with women writers she constantly stressed the burden of business and domestic decisions, traditionally assumed to be male prerogatives, that had been forced upon her. In her case the confusion of gender-defined roles intensified the anxiety of authorship experienced by so many nineteenth-century women writers, who experienced the need to justify their public persona against the traditional expectations of female behaviour and practice fostered by their upbringing. Although the pressing financial needs consequent upon early widowhood had served to legitimate the pleasure she took in writing, she began to perceive that a sanction derived from external circumstances did not speak to her inner sense of failure. By 1885, indeed, insisting upon the claims of motherhood as paramount began to be an index of failure: her sons, now twenty-four and twenty-eight, had not been coaxed from the nest and lived a life of indolent parasitism. Forced, therefore, into the acknowledgement that 'at the end of all things the work is almost the only thing—is it not?—in which there is satisfaction' (Autobiography and Letters, p. 360), she found, when she examined her writing without the benefit of her accustomed alibi, that she could not be sure her work would have been of a higher standard if she had been free of family responsibilities.

Stung by her sons' indifference and her sense of the inadequacy of either motherhood or literary reputation as a self-defining image, Oliphant resorted to writing as the epistemological tool she knew best to discover 'the thread' lying hidden 'below the surface' events of her life. The strong private need to assert her sense of self as more than a product of arbitrary external forces is, in part, suggested by the choice of Sunday evenings for this activity. Her religious upbringing would have accustomed her to the weekly opportunity provided by a private journal for self-assessment and detecting God's guiding hand in the course of daily life. Once again, however, Oliphant's desire to be true to her perception of life's apparent plotlessness led her to push against the limiting structures provided by providential explanations. Here, as in her novels, she cries out against a God whose dispositions are harsh and unfathomable and against simpleminded tracing of the ways of Providence. Increasingly she was inclined to postpone the divine revelation of purpose and meaning to the after-life—a belief which in her novels led to a marked repudiation of that favourite Victorian device, the final chapter in which order and happiness are reimposed. Bringing 'unconsidered moments of happiness' to consciousness, re-creating the impulses and needs that had driven her life, was all that remained possible in the way of self-definition, and it was in this deliberate privileging of small domestic memories and intimate friendships, over against the myths of progress achieved in a public arena often favoured by male autobiographies of the period, that constituted the poignant originality of the work. The fragments, this autobiography asserts, are the meaning and the pattern of a woman's life.

The deaths of her two sons deprived Oliphant of the will to live and consequently of her interest in the experimental process of self-re-creation. The closing portion, begun in 1894, deliberately returns us to the formula of the more public memoir designed to secure an inheritance for her unmarried niece. Nevertheless the attempt to concentrate upon 'making pennyworths of myself sometimes defeated her, and she would find herself drifting back into the old habit of musing, pointless and painful though she now found it, or into the more subtle process of refracted autobiography observable in anecdotes and portraits that present her own case obliquely. The tenor of her life, moreover, obstinately refused to conform to the popular demand she perceived for tales of happy and successful lives, and her artistic instinct revolted against the shapeless proliferation she condemned in so many contemporary memoirs. It is perhaps unsurprising that Oliphant's editors failed to recognize the broken cadence with which the Autobiography ends as its wholly appropriate conclusion, expressing the agony of a continued physical existence severed from all that had made her life of interest to her. It may be easier for a later generation accustomed to the disjunctive modes of modernism to appreciate the narrative strategy of this experimental text.

The pious but misguided efforts made to rearrange her fractured narrative into the cleaner lines of a conventional memoir resulted, however, in the erection of a desolate Victorian folly. Shorn of its more incisive pieces and deprived of its more personal passages the edifice swiftly achieved the status of a period piece, a self-confirming monument to the courageous struggles of a woman who had chosen writing as the only means available to her of earning the family living. Oliphant undoubtedly played her own part in her rapid fall from critical favour. Like Trollope she probably suffered from her own self-depreciation in a posthumously published autobiography, but literary politics too contributed. Her stock-in-trade, the three-volume novel, was as she was aware, fast being superseded by the single volume, whose form invited a different style and may even have produced a different readership. Whereas three-deckers made ideal family entertainment, allowing serial reading and subsequent discussion by parents and children, the single volume might well accommodate material not considered suitable for adolescent perusal. In 1898, the year after her death, Mudie's circulating library still carried eighty-nine of her titles in its annual catalogue, but Mudie's no longer called the tune with publishers, nor did their expensive subscription any longer attract the ever-expanding and more diverse market of readers. Cheap editions of Oliphant's novels continued to appear in the early years of the new century, but neither the format nor the concerns of her fiction appealed to a post-war generation. The general reader had always formed her assumed audience and so it is less surprising that the tide of literary fashion turned more swiftly against her work than against that of less 'popular' authors. The fact that several of her obituary notices made the point that her appeal as a novelist had been as great to men as it was to women may indicate sensitivity to a new critical landscape dominated by male clubland. Liberated from the towering shadow thrown by George Eliot's long domination of the literary scene, a distinctly misogynistic tone was emerging and could be clearly detected in the remarks of male novelists who had recently suffered at the hands of Oliphant, who, as regular reviewer for Blackwood's Magazine, had enjoyed uninterrupted power in the critical establishment. Henry James remarked in his obituary: 'I should almost suppose in fact that no woman had ever, for half a century, had her personal "say" so publicly and irresponsibly' (Notes and Novelists, 1914, p. 358) and Thomas Hardy, who in 1882 had welcomed 'direct communication with a writer I have known in spirit so long' felt free by 1912 to dismiss her criticisms as 'the screaming of a poor lady in Blackwood' (Collected Letters, ed. R. L. Purdy and M. Mitigate, i. 107, and Postscript to the Preface of Jude the Obscure).

Oliphant's own sense that she had taken 'a fuller conception of life' than many women writers may have militated against her as an early candidate for resurrection by the feminist presses of our own day. Within the last two or three years there has been a flurry of interest in her work, but because it is difficult to obtain access to her entire œuvre (most of her novels seem to have been pulped) and even more time-consuming to read every title, publishers have for the most part relied upon reprinting the Chronicles of Carlingford series in which she recognized that she had exploited a best-selling formula, or those novels such as Kirsteen (1890) which retained critical favour among the obituarists of the 1890s. It is still difficult for the general reader to obtain a clear picture of the professional acumen with which she responded to the changing market in her fifty years as a novelist, or of the range of her work and interests which embraced both the supernatural and the quietly traced tale of domestic suffering or triumph. Throughout her work Oliphant cast a wry eye upon the comparative lots of men and women and the subtleties of the human temperament, which often submits against its own better judgement to the orthodoxies society imposes. For society, as she often remarked, looked after its own, and virtue all too frequently had a way of becoming its own reward in the socially inferior position of the single woman. Such a view of life was not without its consequences for her writing and some of those novels which appear most completely to collude with the moral and stylistic conventions of the day do so only after a subtly subversive examination of many of the age's most treasured assumptions. The way in which her worthy but blinkered executors felt free to reshape her remains according to their own conventional pieties is merely one indicator of how easily much of her writing could be misconstrued as hack work produced in response to the prevailing fashions. Restoring the full text of her autobiography provides one way for the modern reader to catch more easily the distinctive timbre of the individual voice which ran through so much of her work.