Victorian Women: 6. Hester
We study six great books by and about women in our Victorian Women course, live online, September to November 2023.
Lecturer Clare Walker-Gore reflects upon each of the books in a series of blog posts. In this final post, she looks at Margaret Oliphant, Hester (1883)
From Hester
‘Next day everything happened as had been foreseen. There was a run on the bank, and a moment of great excitement; but when Miss Vernon was seen at the door of the inner office smiling, with her smile of triumphant energy and capability, upon the crowd, and when the Bank of England porters appeared bringing in those heavy boxes, the run and all the excitement subsided as by magic. The bank was saved; but not by John Vernon. The outside world never was aware how the matter was settled. But John did not come back. He would have met nothing but averted looks and biting words, for there could be no doubt that he had abandoned his post, and left Vernon’s to its fate. Messrs. Pounce and Seeling had a good deal to do about the matter, and new deeds were drawn, and old deeds cancelled to a serious extent; but the bank ever after remained in the hands of Miss Vernon, who, it turned out, had more than her grandfather’s steady power of holding on, and was, indeed, the heir of her great-grandfather's genius for business. The bank throve in her hands as it had done in his days, and everything it touched prospered.’
Margaret Oliphant’s articles for Blackwood’s magazine were conservative in their treatment of the Woman Question, expressing scepticism about the Married Women’s Property Acts, disapproval of the liberalisation of divorce laws, and considerable hostility towards what they cast as the boldness of modern young women. Yet in her fiction, women are consistently drawn as more competent than men – more active, more capable, and more responsible.
In one of her late masterpieces, Hester, she has the family bank saved in the opening chapters by the prompt action and dauntless spirit of the young Catherine Vernon, whom we next meet as an ageing matriarch, still running the bank and essentially directing the affairs of her extended family. Yet the novel is a tragedy which brings its old and young heroines to mutual understanding and recognition through shared betrayal and disappointment.
Should we read it as a rejection of the idea that a woman can do a man’s job – or on the contrary, as a powerful indictment of male prejudice, of wasted talent, and of an unjustly ordered society?
The Victorian Women course first ran in autumn 2022 and is repeated Sept.-Nov. 2023.
Dr Clare Walker Gore has taught at the Open University and the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.
