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“... I too work hard, Mrs Oliphant,’ said Queen Victoria to the Scottish novelist. Mrs Oliphant was famous for her productivity. She published biographies of Edward Irving and the Comte de Montalembert, a literary history of England and more than sixty fat novels.* From the mid-1850s until her death in 1897 she contributed half a dozen essays a year to Blackwood’s Magazine, delivering on Bunsen, Savonarola, Queen Anne, Marco Polo and Jesus Christ ...”

“... Even by the standards of her contemporaries Margaret Oliphant’s productivity was phenomenal. As the author of 98 novels, she surpassed that other prodigious maker of fictions, Anthony Trollope, by roughly two to one – and this is not to mention her 25 works of non-fiction, 50 short stories and over three hundred contributions to periodicals ...”

“... Iwas asked​ the other day to name my dream man and dream woman, and answered with Charles II and Mrs Oliphant – Charles II being the hottest of British monarchs (admittedly not a strong field) and Mrs Oliphant the most criminally underrated of 19th-century novelists (see The Ladies Lindores ...”

“... human family’ or simply as ‘They’, or ‘Them’. The writer who does do that is Margaret Oliphant, whom Miller doesn’t mention, and whose novel Miss Marjoribanks (1866) is surely the most interesting and entertaining example of a woman writing about men in the 19th century.The novel tells the story of Miss Marjoribanks, and of her return, after ...”

“... she was noticed in a mullioned window, White lace cap rising, brooding over her table, Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant Translates onto starfish and nacred shells Montalembert’s Monks of the West Still weary, awash with hackwork to support Dead Maggie, Marjorie, Tiddy and Cecco, Her water babies, breathing ...”

“... 22 years – was on the rocks. It seems that a bracelet intended for Nelly was misdirected to Mrs Dickens, precipitating a row. In 1858, Dickens separated from Catherine, treating her with what looks like great cruelty. It was widely suspected that another woman was involved. Some assumed it was Dickens’s sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth. This lady ...”

“... requires, independent of their relations to their children. There were of course mother-writers: Mrs Oliphant, for example, her husband first feckless and then dead, wrote for her children, earning by her midnight labours enough to send her sons to Eton, the novels justified as maternal sacrifice. Perhaps there’s a deep antagonism, anyway, between ...”

“... double ending, implicit in the psychological and dramatic circumstance of the narrative itself. Mrs Gaskell was fairly hamfisted about it: ‘the idea of M. Paul Emanuel’s death at sea was stamped on her imagination, till it assumed the distinct force of reality; and she could no more alter her fictitious ending than if they had been facts which she was ...”

“... whose writing she analyses. The four novelists singled out here – Charlotte M. Yonge, Margaret Oliphant, Eliza Lynn Linton and Mary Augusta Ward (or Mrs Humphry Ward, as she characteristically called herself) – were all exceptionally productive, respected and widely read. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) was a ...”

“... exhortation in such generous quantities. For all its sensationalism, the writing of Ellen Wood (or Mrs Henry Wood, as she preferred to call herself) is unremittingly moral in tone. The characters are constantly held up to judgment, human and divine. Isabel’s repentant demise is followed by a final chapter of explicit moral directive – ‘never forget that ...”

“... a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow … a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done.’ Women novelists had come late to English literature, and had no more than a toehold in what was still a male domain. They were second-class citizens – just like their granddaughters and great granddaughters in the ...”

“... Aren’t you tired​ of them? One hears nothing else nowadays.’ The peevish Mrs Snowdon, a character in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s ‘The Story of the Rippling Train’ (1887), is grumbling about the popularity of ghost stories. Nevertheless, she is gripped by the one that follows. Accounts of the supernatural proliferated in the 19th century, as the certainties of orthodox religion were undermined and the hard realities of industry and commerce became increasingly oppressive ...”

“... followed the Brontë family story in the Life and laid the blame for initiating the affair with Mrs Robinson. Branwell bragged about it (‘my mistress is DAMNABLY TOO FOND OF ME’) but this is hard to interpret: the letters of his that we have are mostly in a style more extravagant than Charlotte’s and less modulated. The final months of Branwell’s ...”