Books with author Margaret Wilson Oliphant

"She who held the reorganisation of society in Carlingford in her hands was a woman with a mission" Lucilla Marjoribanks is determined to look after her widowed father and become 'the sunshine of his life' whether he likes it or not. Once installed back at home and presiding over her father's drawing room, she launches herself into Carlingford society, aiming to raise the tone with her select evening parties. Lucilla is optimistic, resourceful and completely without self-doubt, bt will her indomitable nature diminish her marriage prospects? Will she marry the wrong man to save herself from eternal spinsterhood? With its superbly flawed heroine, is Marjoribanks (1866) is a wonderfully comic depiction of the conventions and proprieties that rule a vacuous society. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Colonel and Mrs Kingsward have been travelling in Germany with their three eldest children, for the health of Mrs Kingsward. Just after the Colonel returns to London, their daughter Bee becomes engaged to Aubrey Leigh, a young man of independent means. But a vindictive "lady" writes to Colonel Kingsward, enclosing a note on which she has forged a date, claiming Aubrey is under a moral obligation to marry her. Thus Colonel Kingsward forbids Bee's engagement. But when Bee and her mother hear Aubrey's story, it is very different from what the woman, Miss Lance, has put forward. Miss Lance had been an inseparable friend of Aubrey's wife - so much so that even marriage did not prevent Miss Lance from continuing her intense friendship with his wife. And after his wife's death Miss Lance was determined to compromise Aubrey. The Kingsward family is destined to be entangled again with this adventuress, who has an uncanny ability to manipulate people, especially men.

CHAPTER I . When Charlie Kingsward fled from Oxford, half mad with disappointment and misery, he had no idea or intention about the future left in his mind. He had come to one of those strange passes in life beyond which the imagination does not go. He had been rejected with that deepest contumely which takes the aspect of the sweetest kindness, when a woman affects the most innocent suspicion at the climax to which, consciously or unconsciously, she has been working up. “ Oh, my poor boy, was that what you were thinking of?” There is no way in which a blow can be administered with such sharp and keen effect. It made the young man’s brain, which was only an ordinary brain, and for some time had exercised but small restraining power upon him in the hurry and sweep of his feelings, reel. When he pulled the door upon him of those gardens of Aminda, that fool’s paradise in which he had been wasting his youth, and which were represented in his case by a very ordinary suburban garden in that part of Oxford called the Parks, his rejected and disappointed passion had every possible auxiliary emotion to make it unbearable. Keen mortification, humiliation, the sharp sense of being mocked and deceived ; the sudden conviction of having given what seemed to the half-maddened boy his whole life, for nothing whipped him like the lashes of the Furies. In most of the crises of life the thought what to do next occurs with almost the rapidity of lightning after a great catastrophe, but Charlie felt as if there was nothing beyond. The whole world had crumbled about him. There was no next step ; his very fooling had failed him. He rushed back to his rooms by instinct, as a wounded creature would rush to its lair, but on his way was met by eager groups returning from the “ Schools,” in which he ought to have been, discussing among each other the stiffness of the papers, and how they had been done. This would scarcely add to his pain, but it added to that sickening effort of absolute failure of the demolition of everything around and before him, which was what he felt the most. They made the impossible more impossible still, and cut off every retreat. When he stood in his room, amid all the useless books which he had not opened for days or weeks, and heard the others mounting the staircase outside his locked door, it seemed to the unhappy young man as though the floor under his feet was the last spot on which standing ground was possible, and that beyond and around there was nothing but chaos. For what reason and on what impulse he rushed to London it would be difficult to tell. He had little money, few friends — or rather none who were not also the friends of his family — no idea or intention of doing anything.

The beautiful old pre-Elizabethan house and estate of Whiteladies is strictly entailed. The two ladies in their late fifties who live there, Susan and Augustine Austin, are the daughters of the prior possessor. Augustine, who lives and dresses as a penitent nun, believes Whiteladies is cursed. The ladies have partially raised the current possessor, Herbert, and his sister Reine. But now he is dying in Switzerland; and once he dies the sisters must leave the only home they have ever had. The estate will go to the presumptive heir-at-law Mr Farrel-Austin (a man they deeply dislike), unless the missing branch of the family can be found, having the true heir-at-law.

The news that Miss Ferrars was going to marry Mr. Rowland the engineer, ran through the station like wildfire, producing a commotion and excitement which had rarely been equalled since the time of the Mutiny. Miss Ferrars! and Mr. Rowland!—it was repeated in every tone of wonder and astonishment, with as many audible notes of admiration and interrogation as would fill a whole page. “Impossible!” people said, “I don’t believe it for a moment”—“You don’t mean to say——” But when Mrs. Stanhope, who was Miss Ferrars’ friend, with whom she had been living, answered calmly that this was indeed what she meant to say, and that she was not very sure whether she was most sorry or glad—most pleased to think that her friend was thus comfortably established in life, or sorry that she was perhaps stepping a little out of her sphere—there remained nothing for her visitors but a universal gape of amazement, a murmur of deprecation or regret—“Oh, poor Miss Ferrars!” the ladies cried. “A lady, of such a good family, and marrying a man who was certainly not a gentleman.” “But he is a very good fellow,” the gentlemen said; and one or two of the mothers who were conscious in their hearts, though they did not say anything of the fact, that had he proposed for Edie or Ethel, they would have pushed his claims as far as legitimate pressure could go, held their tongues or said little, with a feeling that they had themselves escaped the criticism which was now so freely poured forth. They were aware indeed that it would have come upon them more hotly, for it was they who would have been blamed in the case of Ethel or Edie, whereas Miss Femurs was responsible for herself. But the one of them who would have been most guilty, and who indeed had thought a good deal about Mr. Rowland, and considered the question very closely whether she ought not as a matter of duty to endeavour to interest him in her Ethel, whose name was Dorothy, took up the matter most hotly, and declared that she could not imagine how a lady could make up her mind to such a descent “Not a gentleman: why, he does not even pretend to be a gentleman,” said the lady, as if the pretention would have been something in his favour. “He is not a man even of any education. Oh I know he can read and write and do figures—all those surveyor men can. Yes, I call him a surveyor—I don’t call him an engineer. What was he to begin with? Why he came out in charge of some machinery or something! None of them have any right to call themselves engineers.

The conditions of literary work, especially in fiction, have so much altered since the time when a book came solidly before the world in one issue, that I think it right to say a word in explanation of the rapidity with which one work of mine has recently, within a few months, followed another. The fact is, that a writer of fiction is now so much drawn into the easy way of serial publication that he, or she, not unfrequently loses command of the times and seasons once so carefully studied. We have not yet come to the feuilleton of French newspapers, but there are said to be indications that this is on its way; and in the meantime the mode of publication in magazines, and country newspapers under the enterprising syndicate of Messrs. Tillotson, which are sometimes delayed and sometimes hurried according to the need of the periodicals rather than the calculations of the writer, brings together sometimes a small crowd of books by the same hand which have all run their little course, and ended it about the same time. These bring with them new complications in respect to America, copyright, which must be claimed at once or not at all; so that the writer of fiction when such a combination occurs has little choice, and must bring out his books much more quickly, one after another, than he has any desire to do. And some are necessarily delayed by the stream which hurries on the others. The present work was written some years ago, before the days of American copyright (such as it is). And it has happened that another recent publication of mine, "Diana Trelawney," published by Messrs. Blackwood, went astray and lost itself for many years in the dark recesses of the editor's cabinet, where it came to light suddenly after the seclusion of half a lifetime, its author herself having almost forgotten its existence. What the little manuscript might be doing all that time among other drifts of literature, who can say? But it had to come before the public when it reappeared. Thus it is that, without intention, and without any helter skelter of composition, it sometimes happens that one work hurries on the heels of another, without any power on the part of the writer to stay them in their career. It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art. How it is that to bear so virtuous and commendable a character should be unpleasing, is one of those whimsicalities of nature which none of us are without. I should prefer to disclaim that excellence if I might; but at all events so old a friend of the public as myself, who has always found so much moderate and kind friendliness of reception if seldom any enthusiasm, may be allowed to disclaim the corresponding vice of hurry in composition, which is alike disrespectful to the common patron, and derogatory to one's self. M. O. W. O.