SOURCE: "Forward Into the Past," in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 172-73.

In this excerpt, Gilbert and Gubar explore the theme of the "literary father" in Oliphant's story "The Library Window. "

In 1896, Mrs. Margaret Oliphant published a semi-autobiographical Gothic fantasy that seems to define the literary father as no more than a ghostly precursor. "The Library Window" recounts the obsession of an imaginative young woman with a hallucinatory male figure whom she thinks she glimpses in the window of a men's college across the road from the home of some relatives she is visiting. Night and day, brooding on the absent presence of this literary father, whose intellectual labors she consistently associates with the work her own "papa" does in his library, she watches him "writing, always writing. . . ." Like Hardy's passionately imaginative heroine, she becomes so...