Margaret Oliphant, one of the most prolific and popular Victorian novelists, essayists, and reviewers, has been compared both in her day and our own to George Eliot. Oliphant wrote domestic novels that richly represent the broad social, political, and religious contexts of Victorian England. The Broadview edition of Phoebe Junior, the last novel in Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford series, restores the earliest extant text.

The supplemental materials provide a rich background for examining key nineteenth-century issues such as religion and church reform, gender and the woman question, society and politics. They include excerpts from contemporary novels and poetry; newspaper articles; reviews; essays; polemic on religion and church reform; materials on gender and the woman question, and on etiquette and dress.

Elizabeth Langland is a Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (1995), Anne Brontë: The Other One (1989), and Society in the Novel (1983); and co-editor of Out of Bounds (1990) and The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983).

Academics please note that this is a title classified as having a restricted allocation of complimentary copies. While the availability of bound complimentary copies is restricted to desk copies only, electronic complimentary copies are readily available for those professors wishing to consider this title for possible course adoption. Should you choose to adopt the book after viewing an electronic copy we will be happy to provide a bound desk copy.

Table of Contents: [Back to Top]

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Margaret Oliphant: A Brief Chronology

A Note on the Text

Phoebe Junior

Appendix A: Extracts from The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs M. O. W. Oliphant (1899)

Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews

1. The Spectator June 17, 1876

2. The Academy June 24, 1876

3. The Nonconformist July 5, 1876

4. The Pall Mall Gazette July 5, 1876

5. The Saturday Review July 22, 1876

6. The Nation November 16, 1876

7. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine December, 1876

Appendix C: Attitudes towards Religion and Church Reform

1. Edward Miall, "Our Strength Lies in Aggression," The Nonconformist’s Sketch Book (1842)

2. Matthew Arnold, "Preface" Culture and Anarchy (1869)

3. Edward Miall, "Preface" The Nonconformist (July 10, 1869)

4. The Times, July 3, 1851

5. Anon., "The Poor Brothers of the Charterhouse" (Household Words, June 12, 1852)

6. Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855)

Appendix D: Gender and the Woman Question

1. Sarah Lewis, Woman’s Mission (1839)

2. Sarah Ellis, The Daughters of England (1842)

3. Anon., “Ambitious Wives,” Modern Woman (1868)

4. John Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens,” Sesame and Lilies (1865) 

5. W. R. Greg, Why Are Women Redundant? (1869)

6. M. Vivian Hughes, “A London Child of the Seventies,” A London Family Chronicle (1950)

7. Anon., Domestic Economy: A Class Book for Girls (1877)

8. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess (1847)

Appendix E: Etiquette and Dress

1. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1851-53)

2. Isabel Beeton, Book of Household Management (1861)

3. Illustration from Punch (January 10, 1874)

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments