Politics at Home

One sunny afternoon in 1833 a young girl sat playing with her kittens on the road outside her house in Lasswade on the outskirts of Edinburgh. There is nothing remarkable about this scene except perhaps that she had named the kittens Lord Brougham and Lord Grey after the heroes of the recent Reform Act demonstrating a precocious awareness of current political issues. The five year old grew up to be the prolific novelist, Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant. Her autobiography was constructed by her literary executors after her death from fragments and disjointed memories left by the author. In one piece Oliphant, renowned during her adult life as anti-feminist and conservative, remembered herself as a child as ‘tremendously political and Radical.’ ¹