Margaret Oliphant

In her day, Margaret Oliphant was called the greatest living Scottish woman of letters. She was compared favorably to Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, held a leading position as reviewer for the venerable Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for nearly fifty years, and wrote an astonishing number of books and articles that were prodigious even by Victorian standards: ninety-eight novels, several dozen short stories, more than five hundred critical, biographical, or occasional articles, and several additional volumes of biography, history, and literary history. Her first novel, Passages in the Life of Mistress Margaret Maitland, published in 1849, was effusively praised by Lord Francis Jeffrey, the founding editor of the Edinburgh Review. Her posthumous collection of short stories, "A Widow's Tale," was introduced by her friend J. M. Barrie, who said no contemporary of hers had "a right to a stool near this woman." The young Robert Louis Stevenson claimed to have wept over the beauty of A Beleagured City. Carlyle admired her biography of Edward Irving; his wife treated her like a daughter and confided in her the romances of her youth. In between, she was praised as a novel