SOURCE: "The Earthy and the Unearthly," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4,349, August 8, 1986, p. 870.

In this review of Selected Short Stories, Mangan finds the stories sometimes interesting and probing, though the prose is often padded.

During a career spanning almost half a century, Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) published a prodigious body of fiction which included, among ninety or so other novels, The Chronicles of Carlingford and Kirsteen. In her introduction to six of Oliphant's supernatural tales, Margaret K. Gray portrays a strong-willed literary workhorse, widowed in her youth, who was obliged to support a family of ailing and feckless menfolk. Her fluent but undistinguished prose often betrays her need to calculate income by the paragraph; too many paragraphs demand to be skimmed ("Time flew by on gentle wings . . ."); and her recourse to the traditional Gothic properties too often recalls Peacock's parody in Nightmare Abbey: gloomy mansions, dusty portraits, secret chambers...