Innocent

Innocent is one of Margaret Oliphant’s many Victorian novels, with the title pointing to the central character or to the moral situation around which the novel is built. 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 innocent of the title in Victorian fiction often points to a young woman or a child whose lack of worldly knowledge becomes both her moral strength and the source of the difficulties the plot will work through. Oliphant’s heroines in this kind of novel often face the standard Victorian situation of a young woman whose innocence has not prepared her for the social, financial, or romantic complications that her circumstances are about to require her to navigate. The slow unfolding of how the innocent character grows into a more complicated understanding of the world drives the kind of psychological observation that characterizes Oliphant’s best fiction.

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 figure of the innocent in particular gave her room to develop the kind of moral observation that her best novels are built around.

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, Innocent is worth knowing.