Few women represent the issues that surrounded Victorian England's "woman question" as literally and literarily as Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant, whose odd full name was the result of her marrying a cousin on her mother's side of the family. By the end of her life Oliphant had been a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, and a widow. She was also a professional writer and worked hard throughout her long career as a novelist, literary critic, social commentator, and historical writer in order to support her family. Thus, she had both a personal and professional stake in the changing definitions of roles for women in Victorian society. As a woman of letters, she was able to participate in the cultural debate with a measure of authority, offering her own constructions of moral and relatively autonomous womanhood to stand in implicit and potentially reformative contrast to her society's...