Abstract
Using recent critical developments in feminist social history and literary
historiography, as well as the recent, increasing interest in Victorian journalism, this
thesis reexamines Margaret Oliphant's position on women's roles from a sociological
and historical perspective. The question of Oliphant's position on women's roles and
her own practice has been raised before, yet literary historians have derived their
conclusions from Oliphant's fiction rather than journalism. This thesis attempts to
redress the balance by providing a close reading of Oliphant's journalism, and to
locate Oliphant's own activity in the carefully gendered world of Victorian
journalism
The examination of Oliphant's journalism, a largely neglected area, along with
selections from her extensive output of fiction, has allowed the identification of two
fundamental roles for women which she represents as natural to the nineteenth
century woman: the domestic woman and the woman writer. In the second part of her
long writing career, Oliphant also explored those alternative domestic structures that
enable female authority and domestic existence. Oliphant's examination of female
authorship partly replicates this pattern by suggesting the naturalness of female
authorship, and this allows her to start to develop an early theory of female writing
and literary history, analysing the ways in which the female author can act in the
marketplace. This examination is complemented with the evaluation of Oliphant's
career, which demonstrates a Victorian attempt at female participation in the
professionalising world of letters.
