Margaret Oliphant

Margaret Oliphant was a novelist and historical writer who was born in Wallyford in 1828. She is best known for her novels Miss Marjoribanks and Kirsteen. She normally wrote under the name Mrs Oliphant.

The only daughter of a clerk, Margaret Oliphant was raised in Lasswade, Glasgow, and later Liverpool. Her first novel, Passages in the Life of Mrs Margaret Maitland, was published in 1849, and over the following forty years she wrote over 120 novels, travel books, biographies and literary critiques. She was a frequent contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, and has been described as Queen Victoria’s favourite novelist.

She married her cousin Frank Wilson Oliphant, an artist, in 1852, and settled in London. Frank Oliphant’s ill-health took them to Florence and Rome, where he died just seven years later. Margaret Oliphant returned to England to raise her three surviving children, supporting her family through her writing. Her English novels, particularly those set in the fictional town of Carlingford like Miss Marjoribanks, were better known than her Scottish historical titles. She also wrote an autobiography. All of her novels are out of print, except Kirsteen, which was republished in 2010 by the ASLS.

In later years her prolificacy undermined her commercial and critical success. Margaret Oliphant died in London in 1987, having survived all of her children.