1828–1897
Margaret Oliphant Wilson was born near Edinburgh and, although her family moved to Liverpool when she was ten, she retained a lifelong affection for and interest in her Scottish ancestry. She married a cousin, which added a second “Oliphant” to her name, and at times, in the style of the era, she published—and was referred to by reviewers—as merely Mrs. Oliphant. Her husband died in 1859, seven years into the marriage, and she also outlived each of her seven children, only two of whom survived to adulthood. No wonder she was preoccupied with grief, loss, and the persistence of the past.
The versatile Oliphant might write an essay on Victor Hugo or the ethics of biography for the Contemporary Review or produce another triple-decker book such as the sensation novel Miss Marjoribanks or her series called the Chronicles of Carlingford. She wrote nonfiction volumes as varied as A Literary History of England from 1760 to 1825 and The Makers of Modern Rome. Oliphant needed money, and she was industrious; she wound up publishing more than a hundred books, the quality of which naturally varied. Her ghost stories were quite popular, especially the often anthologized tale “The Open Door.”
An even better story, “The Library Window,” was first published in the January 1896 issue of Blackwood’s, a year and a half before Oliphant’s death. The Blackwood family published the popular Scottish magazine from 1817 to 1980. After incarnations as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, it came to be known by the publisher’s name alone. A miscellany of reviews and criticism, as well as satire and political commentary, it also published a smorgasbord of supernatural fiction. Blackwood’s was avowedly conservative, founded to rival the Whig-leaning Edinburgh Magazine, although it published controversial radical poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Margaret Oliphant maintained a close friendship with the Blackwood family for decades, resulting not only in a great variety of assignments for the magazine, but even in loans against future writings. The industrious Oliphant had a large family to support, including one alcoholic brother and one widowed and bankrupt brother with three children.
The reference in the story to windows having been “filled in, during the days of the window duties” deserves a note. Like the paper duty and the malt tax, the Duty on Lights and Windows was a tax administered in Scotland and England for more than a century and a half, until its dissolution in 1851. It was a hugely unpopular form of taxation and one often circumvented in the manner mentioned in this story. As a Westminster Review article observed in 1834, “The window duty, in its mode of assessment, is not less clumsy, nor in its operation much less unequal and pernicious, than the inhabited-house duty itself.” Throughout this poignant story, Oliphant plays with images of windows and mirrors, translucence and opacity, the present and the past.