Mrs Oliphant

Captain Bellendean of Bellendean has returned to Scotland to begin life on his estate. He has brought several people with him including the older Colonel Hayward. Helping with the festivities is Joyce, the village schoolteacher - an outgoing, popular girl of high intelligence. She is engaged to Andrew Halliday, the pedantic schoolmaster from the next village. Colonel Hayward is shocked when he sees Joyce - who looks like his first wife, disappeared...

He was a man approaching sixty, but in perfect health, and with no painful physical reminders that he had already accomplished the greater part of life's journey. He was a successful man, who had attained at a comparatively early age the heights of his profession, and gained a name for himself. No painter in England was better or more favourably known. He had never been emphatically the fashion, or made one of those great "hits" which are far from...

Mary loves her husband Major Ochterlony, and their marriage is happy - except when the fidgety Major periodically becomes obsessed with some unwelcome idea which he insists on seeing through, no matter how foolish or hurtful to Mary. They are in India, far from home, when he has his worst idea yet - that they must remarry, as he fears that their earlier "Scotch marriage" could be difficult to prove. This action brings gossip and shame on Mary, and...

15-year-old Mary Peveril and her widowed clergyman father seem to be everything to each other - until he rather suddenly decides to marry a young woman in her twenties. Mary is all at once pushed into the shade, and jealously watches the other Mary take her place in her father's heart. Even Mary's first experience in love is complicated by the nearness of the other Mary. As originally serialised in four parts, the first two parts deal with the relationship...

Excerpt: "The old house of Earl's-hall stands on a long strip of land between two rivers, in that county affectionately known to its inhabitants as the kingdom of Fife. It is not a great house, but neither is it an insignificant one, though fortune has brought the family low which once held some primitive state in it: a quaint, gray dwelling, not formed for modern wants. To make an ordinary dining-room and drawing-room in it would be as impossible...

Excerpt: "The sun had set upon the last evening of a cold and bleak December, and from the frosty sky, a few stars looked down upon the crowded streets of one of the largest towns in England; a motley scene, in which the actors, both gay and sorrowful, went whirling and winding onwards, altogether unconscious of other scrutiny than from the busy eyes of their fellows. It was still early, and the whole scrambling restless world of the great town was...

When John Erskine was still a child he had inherited the house and estate of Dalrulzian in Scotland; but he had moved to England at age 13 when his mother remarried. Now twenty-five, he has come home at last - though everything is quite a bit smaller than he remembered it. He thinks fondly of a girl he met two years ago while travelling in France - Edith Lindores, then only sixteen - and wonders if her family ever visit their relation, his neighbour...

I remember well my first meeting with Mrs. Oliphant a dozen years ago, how she "ordered" me to Windsor where she was then living (I like to think that it was an order, and obeyed as such by her very loyal subject), and that I was as proud to go, and as nervous, as those must be who make the same journey by command of another lady resident in the same place. I have an odd recollection too of buying my first umbrella for this occasion - for no reason...

A fascinating biography of Jeanne d'Arc, better known as Joan of Arc, the heroine of France. Said to have been guided by Divine providence, she led the French army to victory during the Hundred Years' War, only to be burned at the stake when she was only nineteen years old.

Margaret Oliphant's novel 'Hester - The Story of Contemporary Life' was originally published in 1883. Margaret Oliphant was a Scottish novelist and historical writer, who usually wrote as Mrs. Oliphant. During her career she wrote more than 120 works, including novels travelogues, histories and volumes of literary criticism. Two of her better-known fictional works are Miss Marjoribanks (1866) and Phoebe Junior (1876). Many of the earliest books, particularly...