12/11/2023 0 Comments Old library books for a window![]() No one else can see anything but a false window. On losing her vision, the narrator becomes pale, ill, and distressed. Scott, who was Oliphant's literary hero, is seen writing in the study of his house in Castle Street, Edinburgh, and the image may have suggested the initial theme of this story.īut the denouement is disturbingly original. The writing man at the window recalls John Lockhart's memorable account in his Memorials of the Life of Sir Walter Scott of just such an image. An open window where the painted bars should have been lets in air and light. Against her will she is taken to a conversatzione in the library. A baker's boy throws a stone at the window, and the stone falls back to the street. He eventually looks around and waves at her, but without recognition. ![]() Herself in the recess and stares across at the window, until she sees deeper and deeper into a dark room where a man wearing ruffs sits writing at a desk standing before a large picture. Is it a real window or merely a painted imitation, such as the dummy windows blocked out to evade Pitt's window tax (not abolished until 1851)?Īunt Mary's unsureness, attributed to the misting sight of her declining years, arouses the girl's curiosity. The talk turns to the library window opposite the house. They include Lady Cornbee, who wears a diamond in a clawlike setting that to the niece seems sinister-ready to bite and sting, perhaps a symbol of sexual passion. The story takes place around Saint John's Eve (Midsummer Eve), when in the north of Scotland there is scarcely any night and in the curious subdaylight people often "see things." Aunt Mary is holding a party for her "old ladies," who are described with wonderful vividness. It is not difficult to establish that the fictional Saint Rules is, in fact, Saint Andrews, a place Oliphant visited as a girl and where there is a row of windows along the library buildings in South Street such as are described in the story. Rules." A window recess looks out onto a library window on the other side of the street. The narrator, a young girl who dreams and is much given to poetry, has gone to stay with her aunt, Mistress Mary Balcarres, in a house in "the broad High Street of St. It differs from her other supernatural stories in that its central spirit is earthbound, with a type of secular consolation supplanting any religious overtones. "The Library Window," collected in A Beleaguered City (1879), became the most popular and frequently reprinted of all of Oliphant's stories. Gray's words, to "create in the reader feelings of sympathy and understanding for the beings who came back into the world of the living." In other words, she wanted to make readers reexamine their own sense of human values. ![]() ![]() Unlike previous writers on the supernatural, from Defoe to Poe and Radcliffe, Oliphant was not so much concerned with creating horror and suspense as with using the device, in Margaret K. Brought up in the Free Church of Scotland, which she rejected because of its narrow views, she viewed the harsh high and low rivalries of Victorian England, in which she spent her mature years, with a greater degree of detachment than Trollope. Oliphant's attitude to the supernatural was, of course, related to her views on religion. Hers was a life of human loss and disappointment, for most of those on whose behalf she labored were invalids or failures who predeceased her. It was a life of ceaseless literary industry, a wider range of travel experience than fell to the lot of most Victorian women writers, a less than happy marriage, and the burden in widowhood of having to support a tribe of hard-up and generally unsuccessful relations. All but two of them-"A Christmas Tale" (1857) and "The Secret Chamber" (1876)-date from the last 17 years of her long working life. Of the three dozen or so short stories, some almost novellas, written by Margaret Oliphant, a third deal with the supernatural. THE LIBRARY WINDOW by Margaret Oliphant, 1879 ![]()
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