Miss Marjoribanks – Margaret Oliphant – Miss Marjoribanks is an 1866 novel by Margaret Oliphant. It was first published in serialised form in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from February 1865. It follows the exploits of its heroine, Lucilla Marjoribanks, as she schemes to improve the social life of the provincial English town of Carlingford. The late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing, who read the novel in September 1896, thought it ‘excellent’.
Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (born Margaret Oliphant Wilson; 4 April 1828 – 20 June 1897) was a Scottish novelist and historical writer, who usually wrote as Mrs. Oliphant. Her fictional works cover ‘domestic realism, the historical novel and tales of the supernatural’.
Margaret was born at Wallyford, near Musselburgh, East Lothian, as the only daughter and youngest surviving child of Margaret Oliphant (c. 1789 – 17 September 1854) and Francis W. Wilson (c. 1788–1858), a clerk. She spent her childhood at Lasswade, Glasgow and Liverpool. A street, Oliphant Gardens in Wallyford, is named after her. As a girl, she continually experimented with writing. She had her first novel published, Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland, in 1849.
This dealt with the relatively successful Scottish Free Church movement, with which her parents sympathised. Next came Caleb Field in 1851, the year she met the publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh and was invited to contribute to Blackwood’s Magazine – a tie that continued for her lifetime and covered over 100 articles, including a critique of the character of Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
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