Elisabeth Jay

Well, Margaret Oliphant, you knew how to drop some names, and I am sure it would have been a lot less tedious if instead of Mr. Fawcett and Mr. Franklin and Mr. Fitzpatrick it had been, like, Mr. Heaney and Mr. Hobsbawm and Mr. Hitchens, I'd've been a lot more riveted, so you get a pass on that, because I'm sure the Victorians cared a lot more about your soft gossip. Beyond that, what an interesting character sketch this is. She's working so hard to feed her family, or she'd've had time to be the next George Eliot, or would she, because Eliot had that "genius external to herself" (little dig of the knife there!), so Oliphant probably never would have amounted to more than a hack writer of romances, or would she, because if she hadn't had to worry so much about feeding the fam she could have afforded to write half as much and twice as good, and would have made a reputation for the ages, or could she, because she doesn't really treat her writing as art, right, she's more a machine for cranking out copy, or is she, because she really does seem to have a stealthily high opinion of some of the stuff she did and think it would have gone places and made her fortune, or would it, because she really did have profligate tastes and might have eaten up all the money anyway with sending her kids to Eton and Switzerland and all, but that's what you do for your family because you want them to have a good life and experience the best, or do you, because she sure does seem upset that none of them learned to be writing machines or some other kind of machines and never learned the gospel of work and really is kind of hard on them for a mum, or is she, because they kind of do seem like a bunch of layabouts and she did work hard and worry all her life and is entitled to a bit of resentment really if that's what she is demonstrating here, but is she, or at least is she against her family or is it just the society that demands everything of a woman and if she wants to have a sphere of her own makes her accomplish it in addition to the domestic--no Woolfian Room o. O. O., no chance to ever be all one can be except contingently.


Or does it matter? Because family is family and a good domestic life is the best of all good lives. And then, bitter irony, all her kids die and that's the remaining 50% of this book is the lamentation. I feel for you, Mags.… (meer)

Margaret Oliphant, one of the most prolific writers of the Victorian era (she wrote, if I am correct, over 90 novels), approaches the writing of her autobiography in an almost modern, stream-of-consciousness way. Interspersed between more typical chronological narration are diary-like entries in which she lets her emotions shine through. The result is a unique, though perhaps difficult to swallow, look into the life of a woman whose dreams of relaxation and success were forever thwarted by money troubles, useless dependents, and tragic deaths.… (meer)