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Thus wrote Q.D. Leavis, who declared Margaret Oliphant's heroine Lucilla to be the 'missing link' in nineteenth-century literature between Jane Austen's Emma and George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke, and 'more entertaining, more impressive and more likeable than either'. Returning home to tend her widowed father Dr. Marjoribanks, Lucilla soon launches herself into Carlingford society, aiming to raise the tone with her select Thursday evening parties. Optimistic, resourceful and blithely unimpeded by self-doubt, Lucilla is a superior being in every way, not least in relation to men. This Penguin Classics edition of Miss Majoribanks (1866) is introduced and edited by Margaret Oliphant's acclaimed biographer Elisabeth Jay.
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