SOURCE: "Mrs. Oliphant's Scotland: The Romance and the Reality," in Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction, edited by Ian Campbell, Barnes & Noble Books, 1979, pp. 89-103.

In this essay, Robert and Vineta Colby discuss Oliphant's mission to educate her readers to the ways of Scottish life in her stories and novels.

The wandering Scot, patriotic and energetic, pushing his fortunes at the ends of the earth, canny and practical, yet moved always by the memory of his old home, is a familiar figure in the real life of experience and in the imaginary life of literature.

Lionel Johnson, "R. L. Stevenson",

The Academy, 3 June 1893

In a literal sense Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897) was a "wandering Scot". She left the land of her birth at about the age of ten, returned in 1860 as a struggling young widow to live in Edinburgh for less than a year, and thereafter knew Scotland only as a visitor...