Dies Irae

Dies Irae is one of Margaret Oliphant’s many novels, with the title drawing from the Latin phrase for the Day of Wrath, the medieval Christian hymn about the Last Judgment that has been set to music many times across the centuries and that often appears in Western literature when the writer wants to invoke the kind of large historical or moral reckoning that the original hymn was about. 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 Dies Irae title in Oliphant’s work suggests a novel built around some kind of moral or social reckoning, with the characters facing the consequences of choices that have been building across the page count or across the wider history that the novel reaches into. Oliphant’s heroines and her wider casts often face this kind of moment, with the careful psychological work that characterizes her best fiction earning the eventual emotional weight of the resolution.

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 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, Dies Irae is worth knowing. The pacing is slower than modern novels and the prose is in the formal late Victorian style, but readers who settle into the rhythm find a strong, character driven novel that takes its time with its themes.