He That Will Not When He May

He That Will Not When He May is one of Margaret Oliphant’s many Victorian novels, with the title drawing from the proverbial saying that warns about the consequences of refusing opportunities when they are offered. The proverb has roots in medieval English and earlier sources, and various Victorian writers used it as the title or epigraph for novels and stories about characters whose pride or hesitation cost them what they could have had. Oliphant’s use of the title points to a novel built around exactly this kind of moral and practical situation.

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. Her novels often deal with the specific moral and social situations that the rigid class structures and social codes of Victorian England created for individuals trying to navigate ambitions, relationships, and obligations that did not always fit neatly within the available frameworks.

What distinguishes Oliphant 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. The specific situation of a character who refuses opportunities when offered them and then has to live with the consequences gives her room to develop the kind of psychological observation that characterizes her best fiction.

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. 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.

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, He That Will Not When He May is worth knowing.