Quiz: Which lesser-read Victorian novel should you read next?

Review: Hester, Margaret Oliphant (1873)

A couple of posts back I looked at what literary realism is – and why it mattered so much to the Victorians – using George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Middlemarch as illustrative examples. Margaret Oliphant saw her own writing as much inferior to that of the most famous of nineteenth-century realist novelists, claiming that after her death ‘no one will mention me with the same breath as George Eliot’, but having just finished her novel Hester (1873) I think not only was she wrong, but that this novel ought to be considered one of the very finest examples of psychological realism.

Hester is like many Victorian heroines – poor and without prospects, but clever and attractive – yet, unlike many Victorian novels, the greatest dilemmas the heroine faces aren’t centred on marriageable men, but her complex relationships with other women. There is Catherine Vernon – a businesswoman who has saved the family’s bank, and continues to support her poor relatives (including Hester). Successful and revered, a local celebrity, Catherine faces old age knowing there are none who truly love her, investing all her emotional health in the ‘son’ she has chosen to succeed her in business. Then there is Hester’s mother, Mrs. John Vernon, who is of high importance in the novel, despite her near-constant blindness to the action unfolding around her. Like presumably many Victorian women, her sense of what it means to be a woman and pursuit of an ideal femininity has kept her in ignorance of many things and helpless in the face of her husband’s reckless endangerment of the family business and her later widowhood. Intimidated by her vibrant daughter, nostalgic for the days she lived in luxury and most at home discussing ball dress design or the preparation of strawberry jam, Mrs. John is the kind of character who is usually subject to contempt or criticism in the world of a novel – but this is not the case.

Photograph of Margaret Oliphant

What is extraordinary about the novel is the way in which Oliphant deals with sympathy with all these women, sketching out the inner turmoil of fourteen-year old Hester, brave but thrust suddenly into an unfamiliar social situation, with the corresponding teenage insecurities, sixty-five year old Catherine, called on yet again to be brave and to put aside her own emotional trauma to save the jobs of many men and the money of her own family, and Mrs. John, who years on is just as ignorant as to what the bank clerk meant when he burst into her parlour to saver her from ruin, many years before.

A cast of supporting characters get slightly less attention when it comes to their psychology, but they are wrought with believability and satirical humour. The ‘Vernonry’, where Catherine houses her poor relations is a peculiar world of boredom, gossip, resentment and rivalry. The Ashtons (distant relations of Catherine on her mother’s side) represent a different side of business to the noble pursuit of success for common good Vernon’s (the bank) comes to stand for. Roland Ashton, left alone to make his own fortune, plays the stock market to advance himself independently (in contrast to Hester’s cousins, now partners at the bank, Harry and Edward, who Catherine keeps a close eye on). His sister Emma meanwhile pursues her fortune likewise – plotting to marry with a pragmatic view to her prospects, which is an amusing contrast to many Victorian marriage plots.

The novel moves steadily towards its climax – the crisis of Hester’s young life – but when the shocks come, they aren’t as a consequence of surprise or revelation, but of Hester’s own realisation of the network she is a part of, the inadmissibility of abandoning her ‘post’, like her father did. Pressed to flee – in other words to act out the kind of sensation novel plot Oliphant so disapproved of – Hester knows that she cannot, observing the duty which comes with relationships, to the mother that she loves, but also to Catherine, for whom she has had so much enmity. In other ways Hester learns the same lesson as a character in Eliot – growing up means becoming a realist, and developing an awareness of the interiority of others.

What nineteenth-century novel should the Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Review: The Marriage of Elinor, Margaret Oliphant (1892)

A Victorian wedding

My second foray into Mrs Oliphant has been to read the 1892 The Marriage of Elinor – a full-length novel about a woman who marries the wrong man. The wilful Elinor marries notorious gambler Philip Compton against the advice of all who love her, particularly her long-suffering mother and ever loyal (and ever ignored) distant cousin John, with the novel tracing the course of her marriage, from engagement to wedding to estrangement and reconciliation. 

For general readers: In the realistic world of Oliphant, inconvenient spouses don’t tend to die in time for the closing chapter and moral choices aren’t always clean cut so expect a novel which feels closer to life than fiction and is painstakingly concerned with the minutiae of human motivations. Elinor’s trials are entirely relatable, both as a love-struck young woman and as a mother in her forties terrified about the reaction of her teenage son to finding out his father is still living. But what really makes the novel is the strength of the characters on the periphery of her story – Elinor’s mother Mrs Dennistoun and her cousin John Tatham.

Both these characters have a rough time of it – both love Elinor and see her suffer, while Mrs Dennistoun fears being viewed as an interfering mother and mother-in-law and is left lonely at the marriage of her only daughter, and John represses his romantic feelings for his cousin and faces losing her and her son all over again as it were with the reappearance of the errant husband. And, compellingly, both never express their feelings to Elinor, giving the novel at times a real pathos and poignancy.

The familial themes the novel deals with and humanity of its characters make the novel feel highly relevant (even if marrying the wrong man today can be more easily remedied!) and what The Marriage of Elinor lacks in specific dramatic incident, it more than makes up for in terms of human interest. 

For students: There’s obviously a lot here for students looking at marital breakdown in the nineteenth century and its implications – social and financial. But there’s much more besides. Elinor’s pregnancy - another pregnancy not made all that apparent to readers until after the fact - is a key factor in the crisis of her marriage, and is worthy of closer attention.

Meanwhile Elinor’s appearance as a witness in a court case displays many of the tropes covered off in Women in the Witness Box series, with Elinor’s ability to speak an untruth truthfully skewing the trial, having a drastic impact on her domestic life at two important junctures in her life and providing the context for the final lines of the novel, when she asks John if she has done the ‘right’ thing.

Elinor’s son is also an interesting character – with references to his grammar schooling sitting neatly with the kind of educational environments described in Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain, which I reviewed earlier in the year.

Any student studying Victorian attitudes to marriage would do well to include The Marriage of Elinor as a lesser-known example.

Which lesser-known nineteenth-century novel should the Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Review: The Chronicles of Carlingford: The Rector and The Doctor's Family, Margaret Oliphant (1863)

Margaret Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford (first published in Blackwood’s Magazine) deal with the lives of the inhabitants of a fictional English town – the domestic dramas of arrivals, departures, romances and deaths, played against a realistic backdrop, painted with the lightest of brush strokes. The Rector tells the story of a man who picks up the responsibilities of a parish preacher for the first time, after years sequestered as a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford, while in The Doctor’s Family a young man comes to understand that independence from familial burdens and duties is not necessarily a recipe for happiness. Both stories are parabolic while maintaining their realism, and both centre on flawed male protagonists, receiving an emotional education.

Margaret Oliphant

 For general readers: Oliphant interests me because she is interested in people. Carlingford is geographically non-specific, and its layout unclear, but its society vividly imagined and skilfully conveyed. Her characters feel real – their loves and lives are tempered with practical considerations and their choices are morally complex. This means that this is certainly not escapist fiction, however chocolate box Carlingford may first appear. Nor is it fast-paced and high drama, groundbreaking in its style and subject matter. Yet Oliphant is a confident writer, who does what she does with conviction and so commands attention. These stories are best described as ‘thoughtful’ and they are best read thoughtfully.

For students: George Eliot’s Scenes from a Clerical Life (1857) and Silas Marner (1861), and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851) are natural points of comparison for the depiction of close knit semi-rural communities. But Carlingford looks beyond itself – to the world of Oxford academia, or to the far-distant colonies, which both receive noteworthy treatment. The Rector in particular will also be of interest to those considering clergymen and the place of religion in Victorian fiction – Oliphant’s men of God are primarily that and it is religious, not societal or romantic, considerations which bring the rector to emotional crisis in this story.  The two stories are also deeply concerned with a variety of social issues affecting women in the period – for instance, the absence of a sufficient number of marriageable men (something which affects the fabric of Carlingford life and the less prominent characters here like Miss Wodehouse or Miss Majoribanks) – and so could be recommended to social historians. Margaret Oliphant is most often come across by literature undergraduates as a stern critic of other writers and , because of this, it’s well worth reading the kind of novels she produced herself.

Have you read any of the Chronicles of Carlingford? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianst!