A 19th-Century Novel Was Written by Two Rivals Who Never Met — Their Publisher Faked It All

A stunning discovery in the archives of the National Library of Scotland has upended one of Victorian literature's most enduring mysteries. Scholars have found a cache of 47 letters proving that John Blackwood, the influential Edinburgh publisher, orchestrated an extraordinary literary deception: he secretly commissioned two rival authors — Margaret Oliphant and Dinah Mulock Craik — to each write alternating chapters of what was published in 1866 as a single anonymous novel titled 'The Wavering Light.'

The novel, long attributed to an unknown author and largely forgotten by mainstream readers, was a modest commercial success in its day. But what makes the discovery remarkable is the elaborate system Blackwood devised to keep the two writers ignorant of each other's involvement. According to the letters, he provided each author with detailed summaries of the chapters written by the other, presenting them as his own editorial outlines.

'What's astonishing is how seamlessly the two voices blend,' said Dr. Fiona Galbraith, the University of Edinburgh researcher who discovered the letters while cataloguing uncategorized materials in the Blackwood Papers. 'Oliphant and Craik had famously different styles — Oliphant was sardonic and psychologically acute, while Craik leaned toward moral sentimentalism. Yet in this novel, they seem to push each other toward something entirely new.'

The rivalry between Oliphant and Craik was well documented. Both were prolific, commercially successful women writers competing for the same readership, and surviving correspondence shows mutual professional jealousy. Blackwood, it appears, deliberately exploited this tension.

In one letter dated March 1865, Blackwood wrote to his brother: 'I have set two fine hounds upon the same fox, and neither knows the other runs. The sport is in watching which pulls harder.'

When the novel was published, both authors reportedly demanded to know the identity of the anonymous writer. Blackwood deflected for months before finally confessing in a dinner attended by both women in December 1866. According to a witness account found among the letters, the revelation produced 'a silence of approximately two minutes, followed by Mrs. Craik requesting a very large glass of sherry.'

Remarkably, neither author publicly acknowledged her involvement, and the novel drifted into obscurity. Dr. Galbraith is now preparing a critical edition that will identify which chapters were written by which author, using stylometric analysis alongside the archival evidence.

'This changes how we think about authorship, collaboration, and the Victorian publishing industry,' Galbraith noted. 'Blackwood essentially invented a blind collaborative method 150 years before it became a concept in experimental literature.'

The annotated edition of 'The Wavering Light' is expected to be published by Edinburgh University Press in autumn 2026, with both Oliphant and Craik finally credited on the cover — 160 years after the book first appeared.