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The esteemed English critic Q. D. Leavis 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." Miss Marjoribanks is perhaps the most famous novel in The Chronicles of Carlingford --Oliphant's popular series of short stories and novels chronicling the middle-class mores of a fictional English provincial town. The novel's heroine, Lucilla Marjoribanks, returns home to tend her widowed father and 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. Margaret Oliphant's acclaimed biographer, Elisabeth Jay, has edited and introduced this Penguin Classics edition.

"A tour de force . . . full of wit, surprises, and intrigue . . . we can imagine Jane Austen reading Miss Marjoribanks with enjoyment and approval in the Elysian Fields." --Q. D. Leavis