Chapter 1 - Oliphant, Scott, and the Novelist’s Trade

Summary

CH 1: Margaret Oliphant, one of the first Scotswomen to make a living as a professional writer, looked to Walter Scott to legitimate her pragmatic understandings of authorship as a skilled trade and literature as a form of entertainment rather than a source of spiritual truths. In her autobiography and her novels, Oliphant drew on Scott’s example to explore the inverse relationship between literature’s aesthetic and economic value. Both her sentimental Scottish romances and her masterfully ironic Chronicles of Carlingford declare the superiority of skilled craftmanship to inspired genius as source of literary and artistic production. The Chronicles of Carlingford became a touchstone for later Scottish women writers by articulating an aesthetics of the ordinary and affirming the vast importance that seemingly mundane events occupy in the lives of most people. But it was in her romances that Oliphant defined her own relationship to Scottish literary tradition by feminizing the chivalric adventures of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels.