SOURCE: Introduction to Selected Short Stories, by Margaret Oliphant, edited by Margaret K. Gray, Scottish Academic Press, 1985, pp. vii-xii.

In the following excerpt, Gray explains Oliphant's conception of evil in relation to her supernatural tales.

Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant was born on 4 April 1828 in the small village of Wallyford, East Lothian, the youngest of the three surviving children of six born to the Wilson family; she died on 25 June 1897 in Wimbledon. In almost half a century of literary production Mrs Oliphant published ninety-three novels, at least thirty-six short stories, several biographies and histories—notably Annals of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and his Sons, their Magazine and Friends (1897)—and various critical appraisals of writers of the past. She contributed over three hundred articles to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine as well as writing critical reviews for such periodicals as Fraser's Magazine, The Edinburgh Review, Scribner's Magazine, and The Spectator.

Such...