A House in Bloomsbury, Vol. 2

A House in Bloomsbury is one of Margaret Oliphant’s many novels of London life, a strand of her work that ran alongside her better known Scottish fiction across her remarkable career. Oliphant was one of the most prolific and respected writers of the Victorian era, with a working career that produced more than ninety novels and hundreds of articles, all written under the financial pressure of supporting her own children and several extended family members after her husband’s early death.

The novel takes its setting from the Bloomsbury district of central London, then a respectable middle class neighborhood occupied by lawyers, scholars, and the kind of professional families whose interior lives Oliphant rendered better than almost any of her contemporaries. The plot turns on the inhabitants of a particular Bloomsbury house and the slow unfolding of the family secrets, romantic entanglements, and small but consequential moral choices that drive the narrative across two volumes. Volume two carries the story toward its resolution, with the various plot threads that the first volume set up coming together.

Oliphant’s prose is unhurried in the way Victorian novels often are, with long passages of psychological observation, careful descriptions of social setting, and dialogue that captures the formal rhythms of polite middle class speech in the period. What distinguishes her from many of her contemporaries is her unsparing eye for the limitations of the social world she was depicting. Her novels are sometimes funny, often moving, and almost always more morally complicated than their domestic settings would suggest. She was not a sentimental writer despite the sometimes sentimental subject matter she worked with, and her best novels reward the patient reader with insights into Victorian middle class life that drier social histories cannot match.

For readers interested in Victorian London fiction, in the wider catalogue of Margaret Oliphant beyond her famous Carlingford novels and her ghost stories, or in the women writers of the era who have been overshadowed by their male contemporaries, A House in Bloomsbury is worth knowing.