Even though she was Queen Victoria's favorite novelist, by the end of the nineteenth century Margaret Oliphant had disappeared into the land of the unknown and unread. Her banishment into the critical wilderness was due in part to her prodigious production--at least ninety-eight novels; many travel books, histories, and biographies; more than fifty short stories; and at least four hundred periodical essays--a pace, established as early as 1860, that suggested to her critics, and perhaps to Oliphant herself, that she was, as she reports in her autobiography (1899), "working too fast and producing too much." Her comment in a 6 October 1896 letter to the publisher William Blackwood that "I have worked a hole in my right forefinger--with the pen, I suppose--and can't get it to heal," is often cited as evidence of her unremitting industry. Oliphant did little to alter this perception of her work; her autobiography alternates between justifying its...