A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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       MRS OLIPHANT The Heart and Soul of Carlingford

      I. A Fighting Life

      In the winter of 1860—61, Mrs Margaret Oliphant, a penniless, undaunted little Scottish ‘scribbling woman,’ called at the office of the brothers Blackwood.

      It was a very severe winter, and it was severe on me too…I had not been doing very well with my writing. I had sent several articles to Blackwood’s [Magazine] and they had been rejected. Why, this being the case, I should have gone to them…I can’t tell. But I was in their debt, and had very little to go on with. They shook their heads, of course, and thought it would not be possible to take such a story—both very kind, and truly sorry for me, I have no doubt. I think I see their figures now against the light, standing up, John with his shoulders hunched up, the Major with his soldierly air, and myself all blackness and whiteness in my widow’s dress, taking leave of them as if it didn’t matter, and oh! so much afraid that they would see the tears in my eyes. I went home to my little ones, and as soon as I had got them into bed, I sat down and wrote. I sat up all night in a passion of composition, stirred to the very bottom of my mind. The story was successful, and my fortune, comparatively speaking, was made.

This is Mrs Oliphant’s own account, in what she called her ‘few autobiographical bits,’ of the origin of the Chronicles of Carlingford.¹ If we get the idea that she saw herself to some extent as the heroine of her own novel, and that she knew it perfectly well, we should be right, and right too in recognizing her as a woman with a strong visual imagination and an even stronger sense of human relationships. She sees the group in terms of dark and light, and feels the publishers’ embarrassed decency and her own desperation.

      For nearly fifty years she led a working, or rather a fighting life as a writer. Her industry became a legend (‘I too work hard, Mrs Oliphant,’ Queen Victoria said to her.) She never, it seems, had more than two hours to herself, except in the middle of the night. Up to a few days before her death she was still correcting proofs. But her fortune, alas, was not made in 1861, either comparatively speaking or ever.

      She was twice an Oliphant (it was her mother’s name as well as her husband’s) and the family was an ancient one, ‘though I don’t think,’ she wrote, ‘that our branch was anything much to brag about.’ Although she was Scottish born (4 April 1828) she was brought up in Liverpool where her father worked in the customs house. It was a close-knit, plain family life, and from the outset it was a household of weak men and strong women. The father counted for very little, and her two elder brothers never came to much. All the fire and generosity of life seemed to come from the mother. Maggie herself, from a tender age, was out on the streets delivering radical pamphlets, and hot in defence of the Scottish Free Church. No formal education is mentioned. At six years old she learned to read and did so prodigiously, mostly Scots history and legends. When, in her teens, she began to write her own tales, ‘my style,’ she said, ‘followed no sort of law.’ Writing, of course, was in the intervals of housekeeping and sick-nursing. In 1849 (by which time her first novel had been published) she went up to London to look after her amiable brother Willie, who was studying for the ministry, and to keep him clear of drink and debt. ‘I was a little dragon, watching over him with remorseless anxiety.’ Lodging upstairs was her cousin Francis Oliphant, an artist; three years later, after some mysterious hesitations, she married him. This meant a hand-to-mouth studio life, in the course of which her first two babies died, and two more were born.

      Although he exhibited history pieces at the Academy, Francis was by profession a glass painter, who had worked for eleven years as assistant to Pugin. (Margaret, unfortunately, had almost no feeling for art, and when he took her to the National Gallery she was ‘struck dumb with disappointment.’) He was not the kind of man ever to succeed on his own: when he set up his own studio, in 1854, he couldn’t manage either the workmen or the accounts. His failure has always been put down to the decline in demand for ‘mediaeval’ painted glass, but in fact there was no decline until well after 1870. ‘His wife’s success,’ wrote William Bell Scott, ‘was enough to make him an idle and aimless man.’ This is unkind, but certainly Margaret was the breadwinner from the first, even though she allowed seven of her first thirteen novels to appear under Willie’s name in the hope of setting him up on his feet. And poor Francis was consumptive. In 1858, when he was told there was no hope, his comment is said to have been ‘Well, if that is so, there is no reason why we should be miserable.’ They went off, as invalids so ill-advisedly did in the 1850s, to the cold winter damp of Florence and the malarial heat of Rome. To spare his wife, Francis did not tell her the truth. She never forgave him this, and was honest enough to admit it. When he died she was left pregnant, with two children to look after, and about £1,000 in debts. This was mostly owed to Blackwood’s, who had been generously sending her £20 a month, whether they printed her articles or not.

      Margaret Oliphant gathered up her dependants and returned, first to Edinburgh, then to Ealing, west of London. Before long she found herself supporting not only her own children and the feckless Willie but also her brother Frank (he had failed in business) and his family of four. Like some natural force she attracted responsibilities towards her. But with this strength of hers there went a wild optimism and an endearing lack of caution. She was openhanded, like her mother. Nothing was too good for her friends. Her sons, whatever the expense, must go to Eton. Yet both of them, as they grew up, drifted into elegant idleness. Their vitality faded and she could not revive it. She had to watch them die in their barren thirties, one after the other. It is at this point that her autobiography breaks off. ‘And now here I am all alone. I cannot write any more.’

      Mrs Oliphant’s novels show little of the indulgence of Jane Austen or George Eliot towards attractive weaklings. Did she, out of her love and generosity, encourage, or even create, weakness in men? Her autobiography is deeply touching, partly because she recognizes this. ‘I did with much labour what I thought the best…but now I think that if I had taken the other way, which seemed the less noble, it might have been better for all of us.’ She did not think of herself as in any way exceptional. She believed she had had the ‘experiences of most women.’ They had been her life and they became the life of her books.

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