Memoirs and resolutions of Adam Graeme of Mossgray. Including some chronicles of

Memoirs and Resolutions of Adam Graeme of Mossgray is one of Margaret Oliphant’s many Victorian Scottish novels, working in the territory of Scottish provincial life that she returned to repeatedly across her remarkable career. The fictional memoir format gives Oliphant room to develop the central character through his own first person voice, with the resolutions of the title pointing to the various decisions and commitments that the character makes across his life and that the wider novel works through.

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 Scottish novels in particular drew on her own roots in the Borders region of Scotland and on the wider Scottish literary tradition that Walter Scott had helped to establish.

The Adam Graeme of Mossgray figure is the central character whose life provides the structural anchor for the novel. Mossgray would be the family estate or property that gives the character his territorial designation in the Scottish landed gentry tradition. Oliphant uses these kinds of central character novels to develop the careful psychological observation that distinguishes her best fiction.

For readers interested in Victorian Scottish fiction, in the wider catalogue of Margaret Oliphant beyond her famous Carlingford novels, or in the long tradition of Scottish literary realism, the novel is worth knowing.