Being a paper read by Mrs. Alice Jane Muirhead before te Shanghai Literary and Debating Society on the 30th of March, 1898
A very marked feature of our day is the tendency—we had almost said the craze—for commemoration: The prominent actor, living or dead, in any department of public life, ruler, politician, preacher, author, artist, the important national event, the history-making battle—all must be celebrated by anniversary, diamond, gold, silver jubilee, centenary, hi-centenary, ter-centenary ceremonial, even the most progressive seem in sympathy with the rearing of such memorial stones, in time's over-sweeping ide.
It seems to us that few noted characters of our dying century have a stronger claim to such distinction than Mrs. Oliphant, the authoress, who fifty years ago entered on her arduous, influential literary career. Rarely indeed, amidst the conflicts of critical literature, is a deceased author honoured with a consensus of approval, such as has sounded over writer's recently closed grave and still is sounding, Strikingly characteristic was it of the untiring industry of her gifted pen, that when, last June, the telegram had already reached us "Mrs, Oliphant is dead,"—there continued to arrive, by mail, notices of hor works yet to appear—her History of the House of Blackwood, her volume on Women Writers of the Victorian Bra; and yot awaited us to enjoy her brilliant Jubilee article, Blackwood's Magazine. And meet it was' that her name should be mt_in connection with the Royal J for her life, so ennobling in its influence on her own peculiar sphere, had run well-nigh parallel with that of the Sovereign she so reverenced and loved, and from whom, as is well known, she received many marks of friendship and esteem: of interest in her successes, and sympathy in her sorrows. For Mrs. Oliphant's life-story, in outward event, was a somewhat Isad one. She was born at Musselburgh, (near Edinburgh, in 1828, the daughter of an upper-class farmer—in this resembling George Eliot, with whom as writer she has often been brought into comparison some of her novels notably her Chronides of Carlingford having been at first ascribed, by more than one reviewer, to the author of Scenes of Clerical Life. Married at 24, she was left a widow at 31 with three children, one of whom, her only daughter, died in early childhood; the bereft family was unprovided for save in the fund of talent, energy, and love wherewith the mother's quietly heroic life was endowed and whose rich outgoings death only stayed. In her
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.