The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant: The Complete Text

Margaret Oliphant was a 19th-century novelist and author of "The Doctor's Family" and "The Beleaguered City". As a widow she struggled to combine the professional life of prolific novelist, biographer and reviewer with the roles of mother and breadwinner for an ever-widening circle of dependents. Best known for her "Chronicles of Carlingford" series, Margaret Oliphant wrote her autobiography over three decades from the mid-1860s onwards, and its fragmentary form does not disguise its literary qualities. It is a moving account of her efforts to support herself, her children and two brothers, one a bankrupt, the other an alcoholic, through her writing, and to sustain herself against the grief of losing the surviving three of her six children. This new edition restores for the first time the full text of the autobiography, more than a quarter of which has never been published before, containing barbed comments on her contemporaries and her most intimate reflections upon the tragedies which beset her.