Penelope Fitzgerald convinces me to read Margaret Oliphant

So why not just plunge into Argentinean literature, if it's so great, which it seems to be?  The usual reason – too many books, or, really, too little focus.  Restlessness and curiosity and susceptibilty.  For example, I have to clear out some time for a novel or two or three by Margaret Oliphant.

Why?  Good question.  She’s Scottish, and I claim to be interested in the subject, although she didn’t write much about Scotland.  Frankly, though, I was happy to skip her, unless someone else insisted, or maybe just read her short Autobiography (1899).  She wrote, Penelope Fitzgerald tells me, “nearly one hundred novels,” plus stories, articles, travel books, and more.*  That’s not promising.

But then I read the rest of Penelope Fitzgerald’s essays on Oliphant, introductions to the Virago editions of four Oliphant novels.  Fitzgerald, reasonably, does not use her space to inform the reader of everything Oliphant does wrong.  She is making the best case she can.  That case is strong.

The four novels are The Rector, The Doctor’s Family, Salem Chapel, and The Perpetual Curate. The first three were all published in 1863 – not promising – and the last in 1864.  They are all part of the Carlingford series, about ministers and curates and so on in a small English city, very much like Trollope, except that Oliphant wanders further afield, into the working class neighborhoods, and even into the slums.  Fitzgerald argues that Oliphant’s art, at its best, consists of the sorts of "minor incidents that lead to major psychological insights" that I also associate with Trollope.

The Rector is the story of a new bookish minister who “[f]or the last fifteen years… has been immured in the college of All Souls, preparing an edition of Sophocles” (47).  In other words, he’s a bad minister, and is about to learn just how bad.  The climax of the novel is at the bedside of a dying woman.  The rector, called away from a party, does not have his prayer book, and “is at a loss for a prayer.”  He is helpless in the face of the woman’s need, and he understands that he probably always will be.  This seems pretty sharp.  I know, it’s just one scene, but still.

Fitzgerald makes The Perpetual Curate sound even more interesting.  Here, we have the priest who is too good, who ministers in other people’s districts and can’t keep his views to himself (he’s “viewy”), even when it means he’ll always be too poor to marry.  A good priest, but not a saint – Fitzgerald singles out a scene where he “has to restrain himself from whacking his aunt’s horrible dog” (67).

Fitzgerald suggests that Oliphant is actually at her best in her shorter work.  She argues that the three-volume novel did not suit Oliphant well, leading to plenty and padding and contrivances and plottiness that were far from her strength, which was exactly my suspicion.  But any reader of Trollope, or second-tier Dickens, for that matter, has hacked through plenty of underbrush to get to the good stuff.  Fitzgerald convinced me. I need to sharpen my machete and read some Margaret Oliphant.

*Penelope Fitzgerald, “The Mystery of Mrs Oliphant,” in A House of Air: Selected Writings, Flamingo, 2003, p. 69.  All quotations are from this cornucopia of a book. And I don't want to omit Rohan Maitzen's omnibus reference post on Oliphant.  Maitzen got me curious enough about Oliphant to read the Fitzgerald essays.