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eBook details
- Title: Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks: A Victorian Emma (AGM 2008: Chicago) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: History,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,Language Arts & Disciplines,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 74 KB
Description
FIFTY YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF Emma (1816), Margaret Oliphant published Miss Marjoribanks (1866), whose heroine, as critics have noted, is a descendant of Emma Woodhouse. In 1969, Q. D. Leavis observed that Lucilla Marjoribanks is a "triumphant intermediary" between Jane Austen's Emma and George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke (3). Similarly, Vineta and Robert A. Colby describe Lucilla Marjoribanks as the "spiritual grand-daughter" of Emma Woodhouse (65). The extent to which Oliphant admired Austen's Emma is clear when, in The Literary History of England, Oliphant writes that Emma is the most "perfect" of Austen's novels (231). But what do scholars mean when they say that Oliphant's heroine is like Austen's? Most seem to mean that these characters are managers, organizers and, especially, matchmakers. And while the two heroines certainly are all of these things, I would suggest that Emma and Lucilla are objects of matchmaking just as much as they are matchmakers. Friends and neighbors of Emma and Lucilla spend almost as much time contemplating whom these women should marry as Emma and Lucilla spend engineering certain pairings. The tremendous interest surrounding the love lives of Emma Woodhouse and Lucilla Marjoribanks ultimately allows both Austen and Oliphant to stress the communal nature of matchmaking. In making predictions about whom Emma and Lucilla will marry, their neighbors surprisingly and amusingly overlook the arguably obvious candidates Mr. Knightley and Tom Marjoribanks, respectively Thus, while characters are shocked at the news that Emma will marry Mr. Knightley, a kind of "brother" to her, and Lucilla will wed her cousin Tom, many readers foresee such outcomes, a disjunction that not only generates comedy but serves to make the heroines' choice of partners seem both unexpected and obvious at the same time. And though Austen and Oliphant are often labeled as conservative because of their frequent use of the conventional ending of marriage, the "extraordinary" marriages of Emma and Lucilla undercut the notion of a traditional marriage for these heroines.