ABSTRACT
By most reckonings, Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant was one of the most prolific, influential, and widely known British writers of the nineteenth century. Over the course of her nearly half-century career, she garnered a substantial Anglo-American readership. Under Blackwood's auspices and through her stand-alone books, she became not only a household name but an important arbiter of aesthetic and intellectual standards a veritable tastemaker in both the United Kingdom and the United States. If part of Charlotte Bront's claim to fame was the life of domestic sacrifice she lived steeped in the teas of death and loss, Margaret Oliphant could surely make claim to a life of similar hardship. Oliphant concludes her discussion on George Eliot in The Autobiography by offering her reader another possibility of what an artist might look like, herself as author who wrote not for fame or money, she says, but out of natural inclination and for personal pleasure.
