SOURCE: "A Scottish Widow's Religious Speculations," in Mrs. Oliphant: 'A Fiction to Herself,' Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 157-68.

In this excerpt, Jay asserts that Oliphant's supernatural tales challenged Victorian constructions of gender.

It was in the world of fancy, or fantasy, in her Stories of the Seen and the Unseen, in the liminal spaces between the here and the hereafter, in the uncharted regions of the hereafter itself, that Mrs Oliphant discovered a place to ponder further upon irresolvable paradoxes and genderrelated confusions. These uncolonized spaces permitted an indirectness of approach that itself proves disruptive of reader expectation. Within a particular tale two stories often compete for our attention: a male protagonist and narrator, for instance, may stake a claim while a female ghost's silent presence intrigues in direct correlation to the suppression of her narrative.

The first problem that arises in trying to discuss Mrs Oliphant's Stories...