The Athelings

The Athelings is one of Margaret Oliphant’s many Victorian novels, working in the family chronicle tradition that several of her major works belonged to. The Atheling family of the title would be the central family whose various members and their interlocking relationships drive the wider plot of the novel. Oliphant’s family chronicle novels often built around the slow developing relationships within and between specific Victorian middle class or genteel families, with the rigid social codes and economic constraints of the period providing both the structural framework and the source of the various complications that her plots worked through.

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.

Oliphant’s prose is unhurried in the way Victorian novels often are, with long passages of psychological observation and dialogue that captures the formal rhythms of polite middle class speech in the period.

For readers interested in Victorian fiction, in the wider catalogue of Margaret Oliphant, or in the women writers of the era, The Athelings is worth knowing.