Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life

As a Scottish woman and expatriate, Mrs. Oliphant (1828-97) began her prolific writing career removed in many ways from the center of Victorian literary life. Widowed early, she became keenly aware of the discrepancy between society's assumptions about women's roles and her own position as a female breadwinner in the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century publishing. This lucid and comprehensive biography considers the way in which a particular woman writer perceived her own life, and the wider question of whether women writers have been well-served by the mythological structures of male biography.