Margaret Oliphant’s Phantom Scots

A Blackwood’s Magazine review of 1873 once compared Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) to Walter Scott, writing that she had ‘made the “East Neuk of Fife” in some sort classic ground’ as ‘Scott’s poetry has done for […] the Highlands’. Indeed, Oliphant used her birthplace of Wallyford and her childhood home of Lasswade across multiple works of fiction, with Fife as the setting of four novels and seven short stories. A further ten of her novels are set in the Highlands. Despite living much of her life in England, the traditions and language of her home country can be traced throughout her prolific oeuvre. In her ghost stories, however, Scottish identity, and particularly language, becomes inextricable from the author’s engagement with mourning and remembrance. This article argues that in Oliphant’s ghost tales Scots and Scottish English become affective, spectral languages that mimic the protagonists’ emotional connection to their lineage and cultural past. For instance, the Scottish ghost of ‘The Open Door’ (1882) is heard but not seen, and his cries require an act of translation. Other ghost stories such as The Wizard’s Son (1882–84) or ‘The Library Window’ (1896) further reveal a connection between Scots or Scottish English and empathy. The Lady’s Walk extends Scots beyond the working-class characters of earlier stories to a young Scottish lady and her family’s ancestral ghost. First printed as a short story in 1882 and expanded into a novella in 1897, The Lady’s Walk illustrates Oliphant’s lexical choices, often adding Scots and Scottish English in crucial scenes. The story, however, is narrated by an English character, and the difficulties of translation become a linguistic allegory for both the complications of communicating with the dead and the preservation of Scottish language and culture.