'I Have Written Because It Gave Me Pleasure'

I have never read anything by Margaret Oliphant (1828-97), the depressingly productive Scot who often published under the quaint nom de plume “Mrs. Oliphant.” She was the Joyce Carol Oates of the Victorian Age, turning out almost a hundred novels along with short stories, biographies and assorted journalism. In Tuesday’s post I wrote about the joy of working hard as a writer, and a reader wrote to say it reminded her of a passage from Mrs. Oliphant’s Autobiography, published posthumously in 1899:

“I have written because it gave me pleasure, because it came natural to me, because it was like talking or breathing, besides the big fact that it was necessary to work for my children. That, however, was not the first motive, so that when I laugh inquiries off and say that it is my trade, I do it only by way of eluding the question which I have neither time nor wish to enter into.”

As I say, I’ve never before read Mrs. Oliphant’s work but based on those two sentences, I judge her an interesting, clear-sighted, no-nonsense writer, probably not given to romanticizing the trade. I like her mix of pleasure (usually underrated or ignored by professionals) and practicality. She is matter-of-fact about her gifts:

“When people comment upon the number of books I have written, and I say that I am so far from being proud of that fact that I should like at least half of them forgotten, they stare—and yet it is quite true; and even here I could no more go solemnly into them, and tell why I had done this or that, than I could fly. They are my work, which I like in the doing, which is my natural way of occupying myself, though they are never so good as I meant them to be.”

Such writerly honesty is refreshing. Contrast Mrs. Oliphant’s admissions with those oh-so-precious author interviews in which humility drips narcissism. Auden might have been writing about Mrs. Oliphant in the “Sext” section of “Horae Canonicae” (The Shield of Achilles, 1955):

“You need not see what someone is doing

to know if it is his vocation,

“you have only to watch his eyes:

a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

“making a primary incision,

a clerk completing a bill of lading,

“wear the same rapt expression,

forgetting themselves in a function.

“How beautiful it is,

that eye-on-the-object look.”