Novel
Miss Marjoribanks
Margaret Oliphant · 1866
Synopsis
Lucilla Marjoribanks comes home from boarding school at nineteen, her mother having just died, with a plan: to be a comfort to her father and to put the society of Carlingford, a small provincial town where nobody entertains properly, back in order. She institutes Thursday evenings, mixes people who do not mix, marries off those who ought to be married and sets aside those who get in her way. Ten years pass in this manner. Then her father dies and his accounts are opened.
Context
The text first appeared as a serial in an Edinburgh magazine, from February 1865 to May 1866, then in three volumes from the same publisher: it belongs to a series of seven books set in the same small imaginary town, a device its author uses at the same time as a more famous English novelist, whom she openly takes as a model. The sources place it fifth or sixth in the series. The heroine has been compared to Jane Austen's Emma, but more resolute and more of a strategist.
Who it is for
Five hundred pages in English, never translated. The irony is constant and never underlined, which makes the book funnier than it looks.
Prizes and reception
Rediscovered in the eighties, and regarded ever since as the best of its author's hundred novels.