A House of Air. Hermione Lee

the whole of my literary life,’ said Mrs Oliphant. At night, therefore, she wrote—nearly one hundred novels, more than fifty short stories, history, biography, travel, articles ‘too numerous to list’ in the index even of this meticulous book.

      She was born in 1828 in Wallyford, near Edinburgh, and brought up in Liverpool. Her father, a clerk, seems never to have counted for much. The mother kept everything going, and this pattern—the helpless man, the strong woman—persisted through her life and in her fiction. Of her two brothers, one became a drunkard, the other a bankrupt invalid. She married her cousin, an unpractical stained-glass designer. He died (for which she found it hard to forgive him), leaving her to drift about Europe for cheapness’ sake, with £1,000 in debts and three young children to feed.

      Before long, her brothers, nieces, and nephews would also look to her for support. Words had to be spun into money, even when her only daughter died at the age of ten, leaving her to ‘the roughest edge of grief.’ She never expected help from her two idle, graceless sons; indeed she indulged them absurdly. Part of her rejoiced in taking charge and preferred her dependants to be weak. She knew this tendency of hers, and described it unsparingly in The Doctor’s Family. In her new biography of Mrs Oliphant, Elisabeth Jay calls her ‘completely self-aware,’ able to see herself in both comic and tragic lights, or as ‘a fat little commonplace woman, rather tongue-tied.’ This phrase comes from her Autobiography, still unpublished when she died in 1897. It reads as a spontaneous outpouring of love and grief, with sharp passages, too, when other women authors come into her mind. (‘Should I have done better if I had been kept, like George Eliot, in a mental greenhouse and taken care of?’) Jay, who edited the Autobiography in 1990, makes it her starting-point here. But she didn’t want, she says, to go through the life and the work, comparing them blow by blow: a career is linear, but a woman’s life is cyclical. Her part-headings speak for themselves: ‘Women and Men,’ ‘A Woman of Ideas,’ ‘The Professional Woman.’ Her only firm ground, she tells us, has been Mrs Oliphant’s attempt to ‘evaluate her gender role,’ but her book, after eight hard years of original research, is much more comprehensive than this.

      Mrs Oliphant, in any case, wasn’t evaluating so much as surviving. The necessities of the long battle made her unpredictable. More than once she described her visit, in 1860, to Blackwood’s offices—‘myself all blackness and whiteness in my widow’s dress,’ a humble supplicant who understood little about money—but when that didn’t work she negotiated advances with the best. She believed that women should be given the vote, but not that she herself would ever want to use it. She could be ‘almost fearsomely correct and in the middle of it become audacious.’ Often, too, her stories don’t give her readers the satisfaction of closure—a conventionally happy or even a well-defined ending. She doesn’t want us to expect too much of life, certainly not consistency.

      Her subjects were the staples of Victorian women’s fiction—money, wills, marriages, church and chapel, disgraceful relatives, family power-struggles, quarrels, deathbeds, ghosts—though she fearlessly stepped outside this in her Little Pilgrim stories, which take place beyond the grave.

      ‘Is she worth reading?’ Elisabeth Jay has been asked time and again. The question is difficult to answer, since the books are so hard to find, and publishers who do reprint them always go back to the Chronicles of Carlingford, probably because the title suggests Trollope’s Barchester series (from which Mrs Oliphant borrowed a little when she felt like it). But although she wrote with marvellous fluency—writing, she said, felt to her much like reading—the length of the three-volume novel seems not to have suited her.

      She is at her very best in novellas and short stories. Two of them, which might well be reprinted together, are ‘The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow’ in which a conventional widow with a large estate falls in love with her coarse-mannered steward, and ‘Eleanor and Fair Rosamond’. Here the wife finds out that her husband has made a bigamous marriage. She has the other woman’s address, and resolutely sets out for the distant suburb, the street, the house. What follows is ‘tragifarce,’ as Mrs Oliphant calls it, ‘the most terrible of all,’ and she risks a conclusion that dies away into silence and echoes.

      This is a valuable study, strong on Mrs Oliphant’s religious experiences and on her professional life. As to her bewildering personality, perhaps no one understood her better than the thirty-years-younger James Barrie. In 1897, when she lay dying of cancer, he called to see her and ‘the most exquisite part of her, which the Scotswoman’s reserve had kept hidden, came to the surface.’ But he does not say what she told him.

      Observer, 1995

1The first story was ‘The Executor,’ which appeared in Blackwood’s, May 1861, but in the end was not part of the Carlingford series. These are The Rector and The Doctor’s Family, published together in three volumes by Blackwoods (1863), Salem Chapel (1863), The Perpetual Curate (1864), Miss Marjoribanks (1866), and Phoebe Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford (1876). During this period she published twenty-one other full-length books.

2If Carlingford is to be identified at all, I would suggest Aylesbury, where Francis Oliphant designed some windows for St Mary’s Church. Characteristically, when no donor came forward he offered to pay for them himself.

3Frank’s stipend isn’t given, but in Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1861) the Reverend Josiah Crawley, Perpetual Curate of Hogglestock, earns £130 a year.

       THE VICTORIANS Called Against His Will

      Father of the Bensons: The Life of Edward White Benson, Sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, by Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd

      It’s more of a difficulty than a help that so much has been written about the Bensons (Palmer and Lloyd have already done a biography of Fred Benson) and that the family should have written so much about themselves. The Archbishop kept diaries, and his wife Minnie wrote two—one a dutiful sightseer’s journal, kept at her husband’s suggestion on her honeymoon, another one, years later that told some, at least, of the story of her heart. (There is also a contemporary diary of Minnie’s for 1862—63.) Arthur Benson wrote four and a half million words of diaries, a book of family reminiscences, a family genealogy, lives of his father, his sister Maggie and his brother Hugh, and a memoir of his sister Nellie. Fred wrote Our Family Affairs, Mother, As We Were, and (almost on his deathbed) Final Edition. He also kept a diary. The Bensons, ‘a rather close little corporation,’ as Arthur called them, had a boundless talent for self-expression, self-justification and self-explanation. Yet they did not give themselves away.

      Edward White Benson took charge of his five brothers and sisters at the age of fourteen, after the death of his father in 1842. This father had been an unsuccessful research chemist who had invested what money he had in a process for manufacturing white lead, but Edward, fearing the taint of ‘business,’ refused to let his mother carry on with it. This was probably wise, since he already had a career in the Church in mind. ‘To a boy of tender home affections there is perhaps no pain more acute than can be caused by the discovery that his schoolfellows think slightingly, on the score of poverty or social distinctions, of those who are dearest to him in the world.’ This is from the biography of one of my grandfathers, later Bishop of Lincoln: it tactfully conceals the fact that in the 1860s his father kept a shop, and got hopelessly into debt. Edward Benson was spared this, but when his mother died in 1850 he was still working for his tripos at Cambridge, and since she had been living on an annuity the family faced the future on a little over a hundred pounds a year. He was rescued by the rich and childless bursar of his college, Francis Martin, who had heard of his troubles, and offered to support him until he could earn his own living. Martin lavished affection on the handsome, hard-pressed scholar, but, the authors