The speaker is a ridiculous elderly academic, his mind still stuck in the Victorian age, whose admiration for Mrs Oliphant is a sign of his absurdity. Yet in the twenty years since that was written, there has indeed been a revival in her reputation. A modest revival; she is still unfairly bracketed with Trollope who was a very different and much cruder writer, and there are hardly any critical studies or dramatic adaptations (while fresh tributes to Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot appear all the time). But several of her novels and short stories got back into print in the 1980s and readers were startled to discover how good they were. Why, then, did she remain obscure for nearly ninety years?

Margaret Oliphant was bom in 1828 and died in 1897. We know the outlines of her story, from the unfinished Autobiography which was published in a mangled form after her death. A scribbler from her teens, she brought out her first novel, Margaret Maitland, at the age of twenty-one and thereafter wrote on average two books a year. She was always short of money and always having to support her relations - first an alcoholic brother, then a husband whose stained-glass business failed and who died young, then her three surviving children, then a second brother and his family after he had somehow come to grief. Throughout her long life she kept the pot boiling by turning out whatever the public wanted - romances, melodramas, religious works, articles for Blackwood's Magazine. She never gave herself time to work ‘with an artist's fervour and concentration to produce a masterpiece -I don't think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night, when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life’.