The open door, and the portrait is written by Margaret O. Wilson Oliphant that begins with the English system did not commend itself to Scotland these days. There was no little Eton at Fettes, nor any genteel exotic of that class to tempt either my wife or me. It stands on a fine and wealthy slope of the country between the Pentland Hills and the Firth. In clear weather, you could see the blue gleam of the great estuary on one side, and the blue heights on the other. The village of Brentwood lay almost under the house, on the other side of the ravine. In the park which surrounded the house were the ruins of a former mansion. The story goes on with Grove, a large old house in the immediate neighborhood of a little town. It belonged to a period when the land was cheap, and there was no occasion to economize. The house was dull, and so were its last inhabitants, and the furniture was faded and dingy. The drawing room was the one place in the house where nobody ever entered.
Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant, better known by her pen name Mrs. Oliphant, was a Scottish novelist and historian who was born on April 4, 1828, and died on June 20, 1897. Her fictional works cover "domestic realism, the historical novel, and tales of the supernatural." Margaret was born at Wallyford, near Musselburgh, East Lothian, as the only daughter and youngest surviving child of Margaret Oliphant (c. 1789 - 17 September 1854) and Francis W. Wilson, a clerk, who lived from 1788 to 1858. She lived in Lasswade, Glasgow, and Liverpool during her formative years. She has a street named after her in Wallyford called Oliphant Gardens. She frequently experimented with writing as a young woman. Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland, her debut book, was published in 1849. Her parents sympathized with the relatively prosperous Scottish Free Church movement, which was the subject of this article. Then came Caleb Field in 1851, the same year that she had a chance encounter with publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh and was asked to write for his magazine. This association lasted the rest of her life and included over 100 articles, one of which was a critique of Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Oliver wrote historical fiction as well.
