‘A Ghost Indeed’: Spectralising the Female Householder in Margaret Oliphant’s 1880s Fiction

Liggins discusses Margaret Oliphant’s 1880s fiction, arguing that it marginalises marriage, instead foregrounding motherhood, family life, and household management. Drawing on contemporary debates about key concerns of the decade—women’s property rights, the legal and social status of single or widowed women and women’s fitness for business—Oliphant’s narratives articulate both the difficulties and pleasures of running a household without men. Examining Oliphant’s realist novel Hester: A Story of Contemporary Life (1883), ghost stories The Lady’s Walk (1882–83) and ‘Old Lady Mary’ (1884), and sensational novella The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow (1889), Liggins shows how Oliphant negotiates the conventions and parameters of supernatural and sensation fiction to explore the legal and financial exclusion of women. In doing so Oliphant emphasises the widow or feme sole with her ‘unwomanly’ business skills as symptomatic of the ghostly invisibility of those excluded from full economic and legal rights who are seen fictionally in the widowed or abandoned mistress of the house occupying the position of ghost within, or outside, her own home.