ABSTRACT
Margaret Oliphant wrote for money. More specifically, she wrote for money in order to support her family in the face of mounting hardships. Oliphant’s penchant for leaving many of her stories open-ended often means that we can never be sure that her ghosts’ visitations have had any real or lasting impact at all. While these aspects of Oliphant’s ghost stories suggest that her handling of the genre is in a number of ways unique, her stories do employ many elements that are part and parcel of the Victorian ghost story formula. Both haunting and haunted by the world of the dead, Oliphant’s writing, in fiction and nonfiction, returns, time and again, to concepts of existence as a series of beginnings and endings overlapping in a cycle of constant if seemingly arbitrary renewal. To conclude, in Oliphant’s supernatural tales the human ties which connect the living and the dead are vividly actualized in the form of the “ghost”.
