Next came Caleb Field in 1851, the year she met the publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh and was invited to contribute to Blackwood's Magazine – a tie that continued for her lifetime and covered over 100 articles, including a critique of the character of Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

In May 1852, Margaret married her cousin, Frank Wilson Oliphant, at Birkenhead and settled at Harrington Square, now in Camden, London.

[6] Her husband developed tuberculosis and for his health they moved in January 1859 to Florence and then to Rome, where he died.

Cyril Francis, the elder, died in 1890, leaving a Life of Alfred de Musset, incorporated in his mother's Foreign Classics for English Readers.

[10] The younger, Francis (whom she called "Cecco"), collaborated with her in the Victorian Age of English Literature and won a position at the British Museum, but was rejected by Sir Andrew Clark, a famous physician.

Magdalen Hepburn (1854) is set during the Scottish Reformation, and features Mary, Queen of Scots and John Knox as characters.

[13] Oliphant wrote more than 120 works, including novels, books of travel and description, histories, and volumes of literary criticism.

At the time of her death, Oliphant was still working on Annals of a Publishing House, a record of the progress and achievement of the firm of Blackwood, with which she had been so long connected.

Only parts were written with a wider audience in mind: she had originally intended the Autobiography for her son, but he died before she had finished it.

[20] Mary Butts lauded Oliphant's ghost story "The Library Window", describing it as "one masterpiece of sober loveliness".

[21] Principal John Tulloch praised her "large powers, spiritual insight, and purity of thought, and subtle discrimination of many of the best aspects of our social life and character".

In the mid-1980s, a small-scale revival was led by the publishers Alan Sutton[24] and Virago Press, centred on the Carlingford series and some similarities of subject-matter with the work of Anthony Trollope.

In 2010, both the British Library and Persephone Books reissued The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow (1890), in the latter case with the novella Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund (1886),[28] and the Association for Scottish Literary Studies produced a new edition of the novel Kirsteen (1890).