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The concept of generation has two dimensions—familial and social—that together make it central to lived experience of temporality and worth salvaging for both Aging studies and Victorian studies. This essay showcases the concept’s affordances through the work of Margaret Oliphant (1828–97). Oliphant suggests that aging, rather than being a smooth continuum, is relational, given meaning by the coalescences and discontinuities of familial and social generation. In Hester (1883) and “Mr. Sandford” (1888) particularly, Oliphant’s work shows us (1) the damaging and gendered effects of the binary category “old,” (2) the need to embrace a multi generational society, and (3) the value of intergenerational relationships beyond vertical family ties. This essay takes a particular strategic presentist approach, testing the applicability of modern sociological theories of generation to nineteenth-century literature. It makes a case for literary scholars to take such work seriously and suggests how we might best do so.

There is a tremendous amount of room within nineteenth-century Scottish literature to discover how women occupied space and what the implications of space and place are in terms of how women defined and identified with place. This paper navigates space and place in Margaret Oliphant's Kirsteen. My textual exploration begins by defining space, place, outsideness, and insideness with the intention of understanding how we perceive the world and our place within it. Kirsteen enters and moves fluidly in different spaces; she thus successfully adapts when situations change or when elements of space contain dangerous or threatening people or circumstances. Consequendy, she is able to move back and forth through the space that links her old life to her new life with ease. First, I analyse the role played by space in Kirsteens personal journey towards independence by first considering how women function as a form of space themselves. Second, I examine how Kirsteen lives within the space of 'elsewhere' because she chooses to exclude herself from orthodox social systems of economy and power. I conclude by theorising that 'elsewhere' is an unfixed space that Kirsteen is able to harness and from which she can construct place. In harnessing 'elsewhere', Kirsteens journey from metaphysical outsideness at home in Scotland becomes a fixed reality of insideness in London. Her life experience can be viewed as a journey through different intervals in space that culminate in a lived experience that finally includes insideness. This insideness allows her to forge a new identity as a woman.

A Blackwood’s Magazine review of 1873 once compared Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) to Walter Scott, writing that she had ‘made the “East Neuk of Fife” in some sort classic ground’ as ‘Scott’s poetry has done for […] the Highlands’. Indeed, Oliphant used her birthplace of Wallyford and her childhood home of Lasswade across multiple works of fiction, with Fife as the setting of four novels and seven short stories. A further ten of her novels are set in the Highlands. Despite living much of her life in England, the traditions and language of her home country can be traced throughout her prolific oeuvre. In her ghost stories, however, Scottish identity, and particularly language, becomes inextricable from the author’s engagement with mourning and remembrance. This article argues that in Oliphant’s ghost tales Scots and Scottish English become affective, spectral languages that mimic the protagonists’ emotional connection to their lineage and cultural past. For instance, the Scottish ghost of ‘The Open Door’ (1882) is heard but not seen, and his cries require an act of translation. Other ghost stories such as The Wizard’s Son (1882–84) or ‘The Library Window’ (1896) further reveal a connection between Scots or Scottish English and empathy. The Lady’s Walk extends Scots beyond the working-class characters of earlier stories to a young Scottish lady and her family’s ancestral ghost. First printed as a short story in 1882 and expanded into a novella in 1897, The Lady’s Walk illustrates Oliphant’s lexical choices, often adding Scots and Scottish English in crucial scenes. The story, however, is narrated by an English character, and the difficulties of translation become a linguistic allegory for both the complications of communicating with the dead and the preservation of Scottish language and culture.

George Eliot’s biographers have viewed the triumvirate of George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and the publisher John Blackwood from the perspective of Eliot and Lewes, making use of their extensive letters and journals, and seeing only a successful partnership that made George Eliot’s name and generated substantial profits for William Blackwood & Sons. This article argues that rather than a triumvirate in which the two men focused on nurturing a great writer, in the early stage of their relationship Lewes and Eliot were of equal value to Blackwood as contributors to his magazine. To the publisher Lewes was a writer worth cultivating, such was his reputation and his extensive contacts in the world of letters. Simultaneously, Eliot and Blackwood forged their own relationship in which Eliot articulated the principles of her art and stood her ground against the publisher’s interventions. Material to Blackwood’s conversations with Lewes and Eliot in the 1850s were the demands of Blackwood’s Magazine, a long-established fiction-bearing monthly whose fortunes were soon to be challenged by aggressive new competitors. I argue that had John Blackwood opted to serialize Adam Bede in 1859 followed by The Mill on the Floss in 1860 the decline in the circulation and the reputation of this once pre-eminent miscellany might have been temporarily halted. Margaret Oliphant, who became a Blackwood author shortly before Lewes and Eliot and was later commissioned to write the history of the publishing house, proved a shrewd observer of the relationship of these three strong personalities.

Many early reviewers depicted serialized fiction in the same terms used to portray ungainly prehistoric creatures such as the Megatherium. In the 1840s, however, Richard Owen revealed the seemingly incongruous, awkward skeletal structure of the Megatherium as a harmonious and perfectly integrated design. Owen's elaboration of the Megatherium afforded a model for novelistic design that vindicated the aesthetic credentials of serial fiction for Thackeray inThe Newcomes. American commentators nevertheless continued to compare the mid-Victorian novel to ponderous antediluvian creatures, culminating in Henry James's attack on ““large loose baggy monsters.”” James's famous epigram, invoking paleontological descriptions of the Pythonomorpha, only becomes fully comprehensible as part of a literary critical tradition drawing on paleontology that, although hitherto largely forgotten, was hugely important in contemporary responses to the Victorian novel.

This article examines Margaret Oliphant's Salem Chapel (1863), the author's only foray into the sensation genre. It argues that the novel's focus on the dangers of gossip and public exposure reveals Oliphant's fraught relationship with sensationalism. Two key characters represent sensational readers and authors in the novel: Arthur Vincent and Adelaide Tufton. By emphasising their eager, voyeuristic desires for sensation, Oliphant marks such modes of reading and interpretation - and the genres which encourage such desires - as problematic. The novel also constructs gossip and public media as troubling, and thus questions sensationalism's reliance on voyeuristic thrills.

In making predictions about whom Emma and Lucilla will marry, their neighbors surprisingly and amusingly overlook the arguably obvious candidates Mr. Knightley and Tom Marjoribanks, respectively. [...]while characters are shocked at the news that Emma will marry Mr. Knightley, a kind of \"brother\" to her, and Lucilla will wed her cousin Tom, many readers foresee such outcomes, a disjunction that not only generates comedy but serves to make the heroines' choice of partners seem both unexpected and obvious at the same time. The couple moves to a country house, providing Lucilla with an even larger sphere of influence. Because Emma is \"first in consequence\" (7) in the village of Highbury and Lucilla is \"queen\" (81) of Carlingford, it is natural that residents of these respective communities are greatly interested in whom their leader will marry, a decision likely to affect the entire community. While Emma largely confines her activities to matchmaking, Lucilla successfully strives to make a \"harmonious whole\" out of the \"scraps and fragments\" (21) of society through her 'Thursday evenings\" (33), afterdinner parties meant to transform and unite Carlingford. Because of their largely undisputed power and comfortable lifestyles, Emma declares her intention of never marrying while Lucilla stipulates her desire to remain unmarried for a decade, long enough to put Carlingford in order. [...]she carries on a \"quiet little canvas\" on his behalf, calling him \"my dear\" and driving her brougham past his house with a \"genial sense of prospective property\" through Lucilla (106-07).