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In this essay, Valerie Sanders considers the spatial limitations imposed on female writers by male editors, specifically in relation to the late journalism of Margaret Oliphant. Sanders explores the gendered dynamics of women writers publishing work in the press without an accompanying, genuine signature. The ‘grey-haired woman by the fireside’ persona Oliphant assumed for her series in the St James’s Gazette and the Spectator served an emancipatory function in her final years as a journalist in the 1880s and 1890s (p. 391). Making the most of the ‘spatial freedom’ she earned after a long career writing for periodicals, Oliphant’s canny experiments with personae facilitate the expression of ‘idiosyncratic views in opinionated language,’ without danger of recrimination (p. 390). Yet Sanders is also careful to remind us that the professional perspicacity and freedom of voice demonstrated in these late columns come after five decades of writing for Blackwood’s without the security of a ‘formal and continuing contract for regular contributions’ (p. 379). For Oliphant, negotiating a space for her work in the masculine sphere of journalism was not without its difficulties, given that Victorian women rarely, if ever, had access to the press on the same terms as their male counterparts.

The collection’s concluding chapter chronicles how William Blackwood’s successors strove to preserve his magazine’s trademark Toryism and miscellaneity amid fierce competition from a wave of imitators and rivals. Deploying a wide-angle lens, it traces how Blackwood’s met the challenges of longevity by repeatedly reinventing itself over the course of the Victorian age. Accordingly, it not only models the insights to be gained through the diachronic study of a single serial but also underscores how nimble any given periodical needed to be in a century of rapidly morphing audiences, formats and technologies.

This chapter views the library as a common locus in Virginia Woolf's diary, letter and essays. Reus explores similarities between superficially very different writers, arguing that their works ask similar questions about women's place in the literary establishment and their access to writing spaces.

This chapter offers a reading of Margaret Oliphant's novel Phoebe Junior and its emphasis on waste paper as the sign of the new finance—in contrast to solid, heavy, metal coinage—during the Victorian period. It also explores how the marketplace altered and superseded craft and craft values, citing the end of the craft paradigm and its replacement by the Arts and Crafts movement. The chapter focuses on connoisseurship, the intelligent identification of artifacts that merit acquisition, and highlights the scrap of paper as the crucial artifact as well as the pervasiveness of the new finance. Finally, it looks at the main protagonist's preference for the latest Arts and Crafts theories over the sentimental values associated with the domestic handicraft.

In this essay, Joanne Shattock discusses Margaret Oliphant’s mid-century work at Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine alongside the work of two lesser-known journalists: Mary Howitt (1799–1888) and Eliza Meteyard (1816–79). All three contributed copy to ‘mainstream publications on a range of subjects far beyond those often assumed to be the preserve of women journalists in the period,’ with each woman also making her own distinctive contribution to Victorian journalism: Howitt as an editor, Meteyard as a pioneering figure in the nascent field of investigative journalism, and Oliphant as one of the most prolific reviewers of the period (p. 303). Shattock’s analysis of their careers demonstrates the productive and individuated ways in which female journalists carved out a space for their work and their voices in the masculine sphere of journalism.

Anecdotal proofs state that women read Swift and commented on his writings from the time his texts were first published, but the systematic attention that results in a book-length critical study would not be made until the 20th century. Some 19th-century essayists, such as Anna Jameson, Margaret Wood, Margaret Oliphant, and Lady Wilde, were drawn, like their male counterparts, to ponder the by-then infamous triangle of Swift, Stella, and Vanessa without being similarly drawn to any analysis of Swift's writings. However, in the latter part of the 18th century, the popular writer of conduct literature, Mrs. Hester Chapone, studied one of Swift's texts, the Letter to a Young Lady, on Her Marriage, in her own letter of advice addressed to a newly married niece. Chapone's Letter to a New-Married Lady reaffirms the commitment to female subjection and obedience in marriage.

The conclusion discusses the shift in depictions of Britannia in graphic art and monuments towards a pacific, mourning figure. It looks at ways in which Britannia is represented as mourning Nelson and her role in the memorialising of this national hero. It then discusses the legacy that the eighteenth-century Britannia and the writers studied in this book might have for their nineteenth-century successors. A key shared concern is the question ‘Is good to come of it?’ The emergence of the clergywoman over the nineteenth century provides a link between writers like Hannah More, H. M. Bowdler, and A. L. Barbauld, and Charlotte Yonge and Margaret Oliphant, and female clergy in the Church of England today. The book concludes with a brief discussion of Britannia’s more radical daughters.

The novels of three female Victorian novelists are compared in this chapter: George Eliot’s Adam Bede; Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South; and Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen. From different religious perspectives (agnosticism, Unitarianism, and a broad orthodoxy) each connects to the Prodigal Son in different ways as they seek to explore the conflict in their characters between family responsibilities and the drive for independence. The role of the Bible, and of parables in particular, in each novel is discussed, before the identification of characters with figures in the parable of the Prodigal Son is compared. It is argued that each novelist reads the motivation behind the Prodigal’s leaving differently, and raises the question of whether or not his departure was justified.

Chapter 4 considers the ways in which, in this period of industrialization and urbanization, the railway contributed to the construction of a new social and spatial experience which resulted in mechanization, relocation, and alienation. Women’s response to community loss and spatial displacement is examined in Gaskell’s North and South and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, which demonstrate development in women’s relation to place and clashing gender perspectives. Spatial displacement may also be connected to the nervousness and fragmentation experienced by railway women at the fin de siècle and in the early twentieth century, when women develop new narrative techniques that reflect changes in the perception of time and space. The second part of Chapter 4 concentrates on railway time and women’s narratives which offer a more internalized experience of the railway, one that defies the rigid standardization of time, precision, and punctuality that train travel required. Rhoda Broughton, Margaret Oliphant, Mona Caird, Edith Wharton, and Katherine Mansfield experiment with the representation of temporal experience and fleeting vision, often prefiguring a stream of consciousness that combines coherent thought with incoherent free association. Nevertheless, the train also remains a site of alienation and violence, as the modernist examples from Wharton and Mansfield demonstrate.

Carlyle’s ‘Natural Supernaturalism’ or synthesis of idealism and realism is interpreted by Mark Abrams as an immanentizing project. This is questioned in Chapter 12 by analysing ghost stories by women writers who reverse this trajectory to anchor the real in a supernatural cause. They use realism to open a transcendent depth in the material object. Emily Brontë’s lovers in Wuthering Heights seek to burst the limits of the material but are left in a liminal spectrality. Elizabeth Gaskell uses the reality of the supernatural to question the refusal of original sin by rational dissent. Margaret Oliphant’s Dantesque ghost stories establish the supernatural as the truly real positively in ‘A Beleaguered City’ and more problematically in ‘A Library Window’. Finally Charlotte Brontë’s supposedly new psychological Gothic is shown to be wholly traditional and to yoke feminist and theological desires for liberation in an apocalyptic union of body and soul.

This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, it suggests that the ethical foundations of the concept of Bildung—and in particular the idea of sensus communis (common sense)—made form in the Bildungsroman, lay the groundwork for one's own understanding of what makes a novel count as an object of study. The operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that one is already a member of a community, and that one's decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis. This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation.

This chapter considers the metaphor of ‘fastness’ that was attributed to young women with unconventional behaviour, drawing connections between ‘fast’ manners fostered by the freer interaction on the train, literal mobility, and transgression. I examine railway short stories which expose young flirts or even more dangerous femmes fatales, whose provocative behaviour threatened the stability of domestic ideology by exposing the incompatibility between men’s and women’s intentions, manners, and morals. Unlike the narratives that show that uncontrollable ‘fastness’ in girls would inevitably lead them to crash, in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely but too Well, Dora Russell’s Footprints in the Snow, and Oliphant’s ‘A Story of a Wedding Tour’, the train (and the idea of fast transit) becomes the conceptual means of exploring the heroines’ potential for the bold transgression of social codes. The chapter also examines the presence of ‘fast’ women in Henry James’s London Metropolitan Railway settings in ‘A London Life’ and The Wings of the Dove where the heroines negotiate sexual desire and social norms. It is argued that the underground scenes mark moments of undoing and rupture, moments during which codes of morality and manners fall apart or clash and are subverted.

This book explores domestic handicraft as a cultural practice in Victorian England and its portrayal in literature. More specifically, it presents a cultural history of the handicraft movement by drawing on four novels: Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Margaret Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. The book examines how an artifact's worth and beauty were assessed during the period, along with the kinds of associations these objects carried and how those meanings changed over time. It also considers a set of beliefs known as the craft paradigm, which refers to the representation, production, consumption, value, and beauty underlying creative work during the mid-Victorian era. Finally, the book argues that the domestic handicrafts' global trade and their modes of production were driven by the Victorians' need for “personal or familial mementos”.

Chapter 1 examines journalistic and fictional accounts of the dangers of railway travel for women, specifically, narratives of robbery, murder, sexual abuse, and rape, which, on the one hand, served to acquaint women with the dangers of railway mobility, but, on the other, helped perpetuate a stereotype of woman as vulnerable, inept, and unable to defend her person and her possessions. The railway as a new setting of uncertain signification, permeable borders, and tentative safety accommodated very elaborate sensation plots, which, however, did not always victimize women. The chapter looks at fiction by popular novelists such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Rhoda Broughton, Ellen Wood, and Margaret Oliphant as well as by anonymous authors published in periodicals. As these texts show, the railway, in which all passengers’ social and personal identity seems precarious due to anonymity, was often treated as a stage by women who found opportunity to manipulate their behaviour and appearance in order to pursue economic or amorous aims. The train facilitated both the blurring of identity on which the sensation plot depended and the consequent subversion of gender conventions through female transgression that such fiction is famous for.