SOURCE: "Mrs. Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks, and the Victorian Canon," in The Victorian Newsletter, No. 82, Fall, 1992, pp. 44-49.

In the essay that follows, O'Mealy argues in favor of placing Oliphant within the Victorian literary canon. As evidence, the critic focuses on the novel Miss Marjoribanks (1866), claiming that "its ambivalent ironies, beautifully controlled and surprisingly directed, demonstrate a high degree of literary sophistication."

John Sutherland's magisterial Companion to Victorian Fiction (which synopsizes 554 novels and gives brief notes on 878 novelists) warns against accepting the "Lilliputian dimensions" (1) of our current sense of the Victorian novel. It is a monument to his belief that the dozen or so novelists who regularly dominate bibliographies of Victorian fiction need some fresh companions, lest late twentieth-century readers never learn "what the Victorian novel actually meant to the Victorians" (1). Since Sutherland does not put forth any particular candidate for an expanded canon, the task of partisan promotion...