A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and the Unseen

Haunted by a sense that the living and the dead are separated by no more than a narrow and disputed borderland, what Margaret Oliphant liked to call her 'stories of the seen and unseen' are now recognised as among the most remarkable explorations of the supernatural to appear in Victorian times. Oliphant was a realist who despised merely gothic or ghastly, and yet she felt that 'we live as shadows in an unreal world' where even 'nature and all her glories are but the phantasmagoria of a dream'. A prolific writer with many novels to her name, Margaret Oliphant could produce her few supernatural tales 'only when they came to me'. And they came with the twilight uncertainties and the philosophical depth of 'The Library Window', or with the extraordinary vision of purgatory imagined as modern city life mixed with metaphysical terror in 'The Land of Darkness', or in A Beleaguered City, her extraordinary short novel of the returning dead.