While the value of critical estimation of Brontë and Eliot’s literary production outweighs that of Oliphant, it is not the only point of departure when comparing these three women.
Oliphant did not grow up motherless, as did the other two. In fact, Oliphant’s mother first introduced her to Blackwood’s and she encouraged her daughter to publish. Oliphant did not hide her employment from her family (Eliot kept her publishing secret from her siblings and
Brontë did not consult her father in the initial stages of her writing), and she was encouraged to write as a means to financial support and security. The strong matriarchal support allowed her the domestic space to write. She often wrote right at the kitchen table, she wrote her first novel while tending to her sick mother, and she used the family’s living space – the drawing room – as her “office.” As a mother, Oliphant realized that “her talent, rather than being seen as a selfish threat to maternity, could be employed as an important contribution to the family budget” moreover, she was “never made to feel that authorship was unbecoming in a woman, or might bring disgrace upon the family name” (Jay, Fiction to Herself 15, 241). Aside from her reviews in Blackwood’s (and early novels published under her brother, Willie’s, name), Oliphant did not publish anonymously and she was “inclined to be resentful of Blackwood’s ‘fondness’ for publishing her anonymously” (243). These somewhat elementary differences cast a mold of a self-assured writer with a great deal of familial support. However, it is the aesthetic differences between Oliphant and the women possessing literary genius during the Victorian period that creates the chasm most noticeable when comparing them.
In an autobiographical mood of retrospective contemplation, Oliphant admits that her prolific literary production is something she is “so far from being proud of” that she “should like at least half of them forgotten” (Oliphant, Autobiography and Letters 5). In thinking of George Eliot, she is thrust into a mode of “involuntary confession” and proclaims “How I have been handicapped in life! Should I have done better if I had been kept, like her, in a mental greenhouse and taken care of” (5)? The “mental greenhouse” she purports as the source of a cultivation of genius ties in quite nicely to Eliot’s own “aim to be like plants in the chamber of sickness, dispensing purifying air even in a region that turns all pale its verdure and cramps its instinctive propensity to expand” (Haight 15-16). While Eliot seems to see the cultivation
process as limiting, cramping the “instinctive propensity to expand,” she also envisions the process as a way toward purification: writing equals influence and power. In a similar way, Oliphant wonders if a “mental greenhouse” would have helped to direct her energies and given her the time needed for “curious freedom” (6). Oliphant was not cultivated, she was not pruned and shaped into an author as she imagines the process of Eliot’s becoming. “Curious freedom!” she exclaims, “I have never known what it was. I have always had to think of other people, and to plan everything—for my own pleasure, it is true, very often, but always in subjection to the necessity which bound me to them” (6). Eliot’s process of becoming is ushered in by the vehicle of curiosity. Without restraint, and in Eliot’s case, with the cultivation of curiosity, the aesthetic author can become. Interestingly, Oliphant here binds pleasure and subjectification, an element of female self-castration that propels women authors to a platform of power. For Eliot and Brontë, a careful construction of their own subjectification in the process of writing results in a
pleasure to make the cut of castration on their own terms. This, in turn, grants them power and
agency over their own femininity and entices them to return to the process in order to
recapitulate the pleasurable experience of castrative cutting. However, the endgame is not the same for the three women. While Eliot’s books, in Oliphant’s own words, are the “object of a kind of worship” and, while Brontë’s Jane Eyre was written with “wonderfully vivid
perceptions” and the “eyes of a genius” that has found no match in the novels of other Victorian women, Oliphant’s novels did not and do not receive the same critical acclaim (Oliphant, The
Literature of the Last Fifty Years 416, 418).
While Oliphant scoffs at the notion of separating the process of writing from domestic enterprise, she admits to being envious of George Eliot and is “tempted to begin writing by George Eliot’s life—with that curious kind of self-compassion which one cannot get clear of”
(Autobiography and Letters 4). However, Oliphant flips from reverence to jabbing at Eliot’s man-made space for genius cultivation in the Edinburgh Review when she visualizes her contemporary in a “reverential circle that gathered round her in her own house, agape for every precious word that might fall from her mouth.” She goes on to describe this greenhouse as a “carefully regulated atmosphere into which nothing from the outer world save the most delicate incense with just the flavour that suited her, was allowed to enter;” complete with “the ever- watchful guardian [Lewes] who preserved her from any unnecessary contact.” The conclusion she draws from the meticulous cultivation of Eliot at this point is that these controls are “curious accessories little habitual to the possessors of literary genius”.33 The line of demarcation
separating these two authors begins in their understanding of writing: Eliot’s genius necessitated the break from domestic constraints, whereas Oliphant refused to divide herself. Oliphant’s writing reflects her insistence on her role as a mother, provider, and domestic ruler. She could not imagine herself living the “self-restrained life which the greater artist imposes on himself” (Autobiography and Letters 7). She recognized the cost of “incessant work” was that “no one will even mention me in the same breath with George Eliot. And that is just” (7).
After Margaret Oliphant’s death in 1897, Henry James wrote of her
[Oliphant] practised [criticism], as she practised everything, on such an inordinate scale that her biographer, if there is to be one, will have no small task in the mere drafting of lists of her contributions […] She wrought in “Blackwood” for years, anonymously and profusely; no writer of the day found a porte-voix nearer to hand or used it with easier personal latitude and comfort. I should almost suppose in fact that no woman had ever, for half a century, had her personal “say” so publicly and irresponsibly. (James 452-453)
As a representative contemporary view of the life and literary output of this woman, James notes her prolific writing, which he later calls her “uncontrolled flood of fiction.” He defines her contributions to Blackwood’s and other magazines like Macmillian’s, The St. James Gazette, and the Edinburgh Review, to name a few, “irresponsible.” James makes a distinction between the “artist” and a writer by claiming Oliphant was irresponsible because of her prolificacy.
Furthermore, the term strikes me as damning in the sense that it implies the responsibility rests in Blackwood’s hands, or to put it more clearly, Oliphant should have had the benefit of a sort of patriarchal control over her “criticism.” The revered author has very little positive reaction to Oliphant’s fiction writing, as he claims Kirsteen “strikes me as missed, dropped out without a thought, that the wonder is all the greater of the fact that in spite of it the book does in a manner scramble over its course and throw up a strong air” (455). In other words, the book manages to “scramble” or to etch itself out, in spite of an author “whose eggs are not all in one basket, nor all her imagination in service at once” (455). The positive critique of Kirsteen’s ability to “throw up a strong air” is baffling as it implies the novel can do or represent, in James’s estimation, what the author herself is incapable of doing. In H. Montgomery Hyde’s Henry James At Home (1969), James is still fuming over the thought of Oliphant and Kirsteen and her vast output in
Blackwoods. After reading twenty pages of her last novel, he was confirmed his belief
that the poor soul had a simply feminine conception of literature: such slipshod, imperfect, halting, faltering, peeping, down-at-heel work – buffeting along like a ragged creature in a high wind, and just struggling to the goal, and falling in a quivering mass of faintness and fatuity. (110)
This simply feminine conception of literature cannot in any case equate to the more masculine enterprise of art. By the end of James’s rant, he reduces Oliphant to a “ragged creature” and a
“quivering mass” which represents his desire to castrate not only her femininity – to criticize the “feminine conception of literature,” but also to erase her femininity altogether: from woman to creature to mass. The issue here is that James attempts to criticize Oliphant within the lens of the Victorian “artist,” a light in which she did not position herself. Oliphant’s positions her literature within the domestic sphere and uses her inclusion in the Victorian publishing circle as a way to sustain her domestic desires. In a final and dramatic end to this conversation, James states “Yes, no doubt she was a gallant woman – though with no species of wisdom – but an artist, an artist!” Hyde concludes by telling us James “held his hands up and stared woefully at me…” (110). The passion through which James conveys his disdain for a woman who is no “artist” overpowers the realization that she did not consider her literature as art, but rather as commodity. A useful comparison here would be that of Oliphant and Charles Dickens. Both authors were prolific in their literary output. However, critics universally categorize Dickens as an artist. Perhaps the issue here is that literary prostitution only garners such damning classification when women guide the pen that leads to over production. And, if this is the case, textual production is linked to sexual production – a woman who is over-sexed or over-texted is cannot be classified as an artist, but rather as a [publishing] whore.
The life of an artist and the “art for art’s sake” movement did not motivate Oliphant. In fact, when she reviewed James’s A Literary Life in Blackwood’s in 1889, she claims his art is “conspicuous as art” and that while his skill “makes a graceful something out of nothing” his “pleasure in these processes manifestly surpasses his pleasure in either the character or the story he undertakes to elucidate” (830). Oliphant disagreed with the tendency of the Victorian and late 19th century author to focus intently on process, which may be why her popularity quickly faded after her death – she suffered at the hands of a changing marketplace and an evolving atmosphere
of writing as art. James, as many critics after Oliphant’s death, chooses to review her work as the work of a late-century author, which she wasn’t. He also chooses to compare her to the terms defining the “artist,” which will always put her writing at a severe disadvantage.
Virginia Woolf similarly uses Oliphant’s writing as a way to discuss early 20th century feminism. This, of course, is unfair as Oliphant did not consider herself a feminist nor a “New Woman.” Her views on feminism and the “Woman Question” were, for most of her life, traditional. In Three Guineas Woolf asks “But how far did she protect culture and intellectual liberty” (109)? She writes of Oliphant’s Autobiography,
examine your own mind, and ask yourself whether that reading has led you to respect disinterested culture and intellectual liberty. Has it on the contrary
smeared your mind and dejected your imagination, and led you to deplore the fact that Mrs. Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children. (109-110)
The notion of “disinterested culture” would have been foreign to Oliphant who saw her “culture” as part and parcel of the domestic sphere. Additionally, Woolf equates Oliphant’s prostituted brain as one devoid of “intellectual liberty.” While Oliphant would agree to Woolf’s assignation that her work provided the means to educate her children, she would not have understood this process as an intellectual slavery. By contrast, Oliphant was given great leeway by her editors to write on various political topics and her fiction exhibits a progression in thought toward more “radical” feminist viewpoints—those Woolf later espouses in her own writing. While there are clear representations of women who succeeded by separating themselves from domestic
Oliphant chose to entwine her writing self with her domestic endeavors. Woolf’s aim here misses the mark in that it calls on her readers to view Oliphant through the lens of a post- Victorian culture. While her Autobiography does illustrate her understanding of “making pennyworths” (Autobiography 140) of herself, she never would have equated the act of
publishing to prostitution. Furthermore, writing was the very activity that granted her financial freedom and a “room of her own,” over which she ruled by and supported by her own hand. While Oliphant recognized “that I must resign myself to do second-class work all my life from lack of time to do myself full justice” (qtd in Dinnage 247), she also notes that “I did with much labour what I thought the best, and there is only a might have been on the other side”
(Autobiography and Letters 7).