2028 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Margaret Oliphant, the brilliant and prolific Victorian novelist, biographer, essayist, reviewer and short-story writer. This special issue of the journal Women’s Writing will celebrate her rich and varied body of work, showcasing the latest developments in Oliphant studies and exploring what this once-neglected but increasingly widely recognized writer has to offer twenty-first century critics and readers.
Women's Writing published a special issue on Oliphant in 1999 to coincide with the centenary of her death; in the nearly 30 years since then, a growing body of scholarship has recognized the value and interest of her oeuvre. The Pickering & Chatto Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, edited by Elisabeth Jay and Joanne Shattock (25 volumes, 2011-16) brings a substantial selection of her work into the scholarly domain, providing a secure foundation for further research. George Levine’s interventions (JVC 2014 and ELH 2016) encourage us to attend to Oliphant’s innovation and sophistication of style as well as content; Valerie Sanders’ Margaret Oliphant (Edward Everett Root, 2020) likewise shows how Oliphant “narrows the gap between mature Victorianism and early modernism” (p. 191), while nonetheless encouraging us to evaluate Oliphant on her own merits, of which she herself was a harsh critic.
Women's Writing welcomes proposals for articles of 7000 words, on topics including but not limited to Oliphant’s:
- realist novels
- short stories / ghost stories
- work as historian, biographer and/or art historian
- literary criticism
- travel writing
- autobiography
- correspondence
- serialization
- writing style
- approach to the Woman Question
- engagement with religious belief and/or grief
- engagement with temporality, ageing, generation
- engagement with motherhood, widowhood, family
- relationship with her publishers
- relationship with her contemporaries;
- the critical history of Oliphant studies.
Please submit abstracts of around 300 words, with a short biographical note, to the guest editors, Helen Kingstone (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Clare Walker Gore (Lucy Cavendish, Cambridge) at helen.kingstone@rhul.ac.uk and chw37@cam.ac.uk by 1st December 2025. The editors expect to notify contributors in January 2026, and anticipate that completed articles of 7000 words would be due by September 2026.
