SOURCE: "Feminist or Antifeminist? Oliphant and the Woman Question," in Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive, edited by D. J. Trela, Associated University Presses, 1995, pp. 165-79.

In the essay below, Williams explores Oliphant's views on the women's movement of the mid-1860s, finding the author "a complex figure, typecast as antifeminist, yet concerned throughout her life with the problems of women."

On 16 August 1866 Margaret Oliphant wrote to her publisher John Blackwood:

I send you a little paper I have just finished about Stuart Mill and his mad notion of the franchise for women. . . . Probably you will find it too respectful to Mr Mill, but I can't for my part find any satisfaction in simply jeering at a man who may do a foolish thing in his life but yet is a great philosopher. (A&L 211)

This has often been used against her by people who have...