Oliphant assembles an entertaining crew of characters around the standout figures of Catherine and Hester. Certainly, Oliphant knew what it was suddenly to be holding up a family financially, as she did after the death of her husband, and again after the bankruptcy and death of her brother, when she took on his family as well. Oliphant’s characterization of the indomitable, flawed Catherine Vernon is quite wonderful, and I suspect a lot of her life experience flowed into it. This is the Bechdel test written very large indeed.

You know from the start that a standoff will ensue between Catherine and Hester but, for much of the novel, your attention is distracted by mediating figures muddling around in the middle ground between the two.Ī novel that rests ultimately on the relationship of an older woman and a younger is hardly common in the Western literary tradition. Although the centrality of this relationship is hinted at from the outset, it is held in abeyance for much of the novel. The fulcrum of the book is supplied by the tension between the paired, antagonistic characters of Catherine and Hester Vernon: the first, in her sixties, a powerful philanthropist, with semi-regal status within her provincial setting the second, a young, restless, unwillingly dependent relative, passionately resentful of her subordinate status. In some ways, it’s more interesting than anything I have read of Gaskell’s, in that it’s a little weirder and more original and less resolved. It’s a fine, rich, absorbing late-Victorian novel-I would say on a par with the works of Elizabeth Gaskell (high praise in my book). Hester lived up to my expectations in full. I was keen to read a ‘serious’ work by Margaret Oliphant, having enjoyed her witty, ironic Miss Marjoribanks.

Hester by Mrs. Oliphant