Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago
by Margaret Oliphant
edited by Anne M. Scriven

First published in 1890, KIRSTEEN is a startlingly modern novel that offers a fascinating perspective on women in Victorian society

7/7

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/volumes/kirsteen/

“THE OPEN DOOR… explores the borders between the natural physical world and the spiritual one. Like many of Oliphant’s ghost stories, it is about a past which refuses to be silent and a modernity which refuses to listen to it.”

—Prof Rosemary Mitchell on Margaret Oliphant’s THE OPEN DOOR

6/7

https://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/blog/blog-posts/margaret-oliphants-the-open-door-looking-back-to-move-forward.php

“The Victorian era witnessed the emergence of a new genre of science fiction, dystopian literature… Oliphant’s short story ‘The Land of Darkness’ is an important and overlooked example”

—Dr Oliver Tearle on Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Land of Darkness’

5/7

https://interestingliterature.com/2017/06/dante-among-the-machines-margaret-oliphants-the-land-of-darkness/

“The belief persists that nineteenth-century Scotland failed to develop a realist novel […] I have argued here that this supposition rests on the neglect of women’s writing”

—Prof Juliet Shields on “Oliphant & Co.”: Scottish women writers of the later 19th century

4/7

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2018/06/oliphant-co/

Virginia Woolf wrote that Margaret Oliphant had “sold her brain” & “prostituted her culture”…

—on BBC Sounds: Clare Walker Gore discusses Oliphant’s career, laments Woolf’s dismissal of her work, & shows why Oliphant deserves to be read today

3/7

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0853wzj

“Oliphant… creates a series of insightful, witty & compelling narratives & characters that are deeply uncomfortable with the romantic conventions of the 19th-century novel”

—Laura Witz on Oliphant’s subversion of Victorian romance & gender conventions

2/7

https://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/03/31/margaret-oliphant/

@bookstodon

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of to-day…

—Robert Louis Stevenson’s introductory poem to TREASURE ISLAND

Free ebook editions of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, & a linked index to all the stories in all twelve volumes, are available to download from @gutenberg_org

@bookstodon

6/6

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30580

“The taste of the world, which has veered so often, is constant enough to fairy tales… we are still repeating to the boys and girls of each generation the stories that were old before Homer sang…”

—from Andrew Lang’s Introduction to THE BLUE FAIRY BOOK (1889)

5/6

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Blue_Fairy_Book

“I have three extra physical sets and I travel with an ebook version of them in my iPad. These stories started their journey with me when I was very young.”

—Guillermo del Toro on Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books

4/6

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/10/guillermo-del-toro-the-books-tv-film-and-music-that-brought-me-to-crimson-peak

“To me, Lang himself is a hero of literature. Besides being the champion of Robert Louis Stevenson & Haggard, he was the first critic to produce a study of Kipling’s work, found a publisher for the young Arthur Conan Doyle’s first major novel… & repeatedly informed the English that Mark Twain was one of the world’s great writers”

—Michael Dirda on Andrew Lang, in the Washington Post

3/6

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/more-than-a-century-later-the-wonderful-work-of-andrew-lang-holds-up-remarkably-well/2020/08/12/4bff860e-dc07-11ea-809e-b8be57ba616e_story.html

“His own fairy narratives, however, and their success in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, suggest… that fairies persist, & become figures of fascination in this period, not because they offer an escape into the past, but because they speak powerfully, if indirectly, about present concerns”

—Andrew Teverson on Andrew Lang & the Fairies

2/6

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/12/a-shy-and-fugitive-people-andrew-lang-and-the-fairies/