Lucilla Marjoribanks comes home to Carlingford at nineteen, on the death of her mother, with two settled aims: to be a comfort to dear papa, the town's dry, clever doctor, and to revolutionise the society of Carlingford. Within months she has done it. Through her celebrated Thursday Evenings — planned with the genius of a general and the tact of a diplomat — she takes a scattering of dull, suspicious households and welds them into a society, choosing the guests, arranging the rooms, managing the talk, and reigning, unmarried and unrivalled, for ten triumphant years.

Around her move her devoted, exiled cousin Tom; the charming and dubious Mr. Cavendish, the one man in town who can flirt at a party; the dangerously beautiful singer Barbara Lake; and, when the town's Member of Parliament dies and the borough falls open, the upright Mr. Ashburton, whose election Lucilla takes up as her grandest campaign yet. The long-deferred marriage plot arrives only when her reign has run its course and the question becomes what a woman of such powers is to do with the rest of her life.

Oliphant's great comic joke — sustained for six hundred pages and never flagging — is to describe a young woman's conquest of a provincial tea-party in the language of statesmanship, so that a dinner becomes a feat of generalship and a drawing-room a diplomatic triumph. Beneath the comedy lies a quietly radical subject: the waste of a first-rate mind given nowhere to go. Lucilla has the temperament of a statesman and the world offers her only a drawing-room — and the book lets us feel both the absurdity and the ache of that.

Long underrated, Miss Marjoribanks is now recognised as Oliphant's masterpiece and a direct successor to Austen's Emma: the comedy of a vain, competent, genuinely good-natured heroine whose ambition has no public outlet, and one of the sharpest studies in Victorian fiction of the limits a society sets on clever women.