ABSTRACT
The greatest amount of positive critical attention so far has been given to Oliphant' five-volume Chronicles of Carlingford: The Rector and The Doctor' Family; Salem Chapel; The Perpetual Curate; Miss Marjoribanks ; and Phoebe Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford. Among them the most consistent praise has been directed at Miss Marjoribanks. Q. D. Leavis, who wrote an introduction to a 1969 reprint of the novel, deserves credit for beginning the modern recovery of Miss Marjoribanks. Miss Marjoribanks is an ironic comedy about power, the story of a young unmarried woman' efforts to achieve power within the narrow confines allowed to daughters of the genteel classes. Lucilla Marjoribanks returns home from school at the beginning of the novel to her widowed father, a prosperous physician in the quiet Tory town of Carlingford, and to a traditional patriarchal society. Lucilla She becomes thereby Oliphant' emblem of the unfair limitations placed on Victorian women.
