OLIPHANT, Mrs. [Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant]. - A Beleaguered City being a narrative of certain recent events in the city of Semur, in the Department of the Haute Bourgogne. A story of the seen and the unseen.

London, Macmillan 1880. Octavo contemporary gilt vellum with a stiff yapp front edge, all edges gilded (spine slightly darkened). Endpapers spotted, a handsome copy inscribed on the title: "For Harriet Kingscote with love and good wishes. M.O.W.O." ¶ First edition of this occult fantasy - in which the dead of Semur teach the living a lesson - that is better than modern critics might have you believe. Even the tackiest passages of wish fullfilment are balanced by the clean edge of ... hardly realism, but certainly a quiet sardonic humour.Harriet Kingscote was probably family - a Louisa Oliphant married a Kingscote in the 1840s - but then, every family that had a whiff of the peerage was family. It was hard not to marry your cousin. Mrs Oliphant did. The inscription is dated four years after publication and in the meantime she had published another hundred or so books probably, but A Beleaguered City was one of the very few of her novels that she liked.

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