Publisher's Synopsis
Margaret Oliphant was a 19th-century novelist and author of "The Doctor's Family" and "The Beleaguered City". As a widow she struggled to combine the professional life of prolific novelist, biographer and reviewer with the roles of mother and breadwinner for an ever-widening circle of dependents. Best known for her "Chronicles of Carlingford" series, Margaret Oliphant wrote her autobiography over three decades from the mid-1860s onwards, and its fragmentary form does not disguise its literary qualities. It is a moving account of her efforts to support herself, her children and two brothers, one a bankrupt, the other an alcoholic, through her writing, and to sustain herself against the grief of losing the surviving three of her six children.;This new edition restores for the first time the full text of the autobiography, more than a quarter of which has never been published before, containing barbed comments on her contemporaries and her most intimate reflections upon the tragedies which beset her.
