Mrs. Oliphant: "a fiction to herself" : a literary life

As an expatriate Scots woman, Mrs Oliphant (1828-97) started her prolific and accomplished writing career far removed from the centre of Victorian literary life. Presenting an often surprising portrait of the professional Victorian woman writer, Elisabeth Jay's comprehensive biography considers the way in which Mrs Oliphant perceived her own life, and the wider question of whether women writers have been well served by the mythological structures of male biography.