Spinsters and authors: women's roles in Margaret Oliphant's writing

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 journalismThe 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.