SOURCE: "Mrs. Oliphant and the Tradition," in Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel, Clarendon Press, 1975, pp. 231-48.

In the following essay, Cunningham surveys Oliphant's treatment of Scottish and English dissent. Although the critic finds Oliphant better able to present the situation in her homeland than in England, she argues that, overall, Oliphant 's work suffers from a lack of "originality and imaginative engagement," and calls her fiction "simplified" and "trivial."

Are you, then, so eager to return to Scott,
 who never seems to have suffered from writer's cramp?
 George Moore to Edmund Gosse,
 in George Moore, Avowals.

New Grub Street was a world away from George Eliot, but Mrs. Oliphant was often confused with her major rival.¹ Joseph Langford suspected Mrs. Oliphant of having written 'Amos Barton'.² George Eliot re-sented the imputation that Salem Chapel was a novel of hers: 'I am NOT the author of...