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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
"A Little Pilgrim: Stories of the Seen and the Unseen" by Mrs. Oliphant is a profound exploration of the spiritual and the mundane, weaving together narratives that navigate the thin veil between the material and the ethereal. Through her vivid and evocative prose, Oliphant crafts a series of intertwined tales that invite readers to contemplate the nature of existence, faith, and the unseen forces that shape human lives. The book is marked by its rich descriptive style and a keen psychological insight that reflects the Victorian preoccupation with spirituality and the supernatural, set against the backdrop of an ever-evolving world. Mrs. Oliphant, a prominent figure in Victorian literature, was known not only for her novels but also for her keen social commentary and vivid characterizations. Drawing from her own experiences and deep-seated religious beliefs, she penned this collection at a time when debates about faith and reason were prevalent. Her background as a writer for leading literary magazines and her engagement with philosophical ideas helped her articulate the nuanced relationship between the seen and the unseen, which permeates this work. This book is highly recommended for readers interested in Victorian literature, those who seek to explore themes of spirituality and the human condition, and anyone who appreciates beautifully crafted stories that challenge the boundaries of perception. "A Little Pilgrim" serves not only as a reflection on faith but also as a compelling invitation to delve deeper into the mysteries of life. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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A Little Pilgrim: Stories of the Seen and the Unseen
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection assembles A Little Pilgrim: Stories of the Seen and the Unseen by Mrs. Oliphant as a unified reading experience. It brings together A LITTLE PILGRIM with the two subsequent parts, I and II, so that their interlinked visions can be encountered in sequence. The purpose is to present, in one place, the strand of Oliphant’s work that explores spiritual inquiry through quiet, humane storytelling. Rather than a miscellany, this volume is a carefully grouped cycle, allowing readers to trace recurrent motifs and voices across the whole. It highlights a distinctive facet of a prolific Victorian writer’s imagination in a concentrated, coherent form.
The texts in this volume are short works of prose fiction: linked tales, visionary sketches, and reflective episodes that together form a cohesive cycle. They are not plays, poems, essays, or diaries, nor are they arranged as letters; instead, they are narrative pieces that share settings, speakers, and concerns. Their forms vary from concise vignettes to more extended episodes, but each remains within the scope of short fiction. The emphasis falls on scene, mood, and moral reflection rather than elaborate plotting, a mode that permits delicate shifts of perspective as the cycle moves between the realms suggested by its title.
A LITTLE PILGRIM opens the cycle and establishes its premise: a figure whose experiences afford glimpses of the unseen world as it touches the seen. The following parts, I and II, continue and deepen this line of exploration, returning to familiar voices while widening the range of encounters. The arrangement here preserves that arc, encouraging a steady progression from first intimations to broader vistas. Readers may approach each part independently, but the cumulative effect is strongest when the pieces are read in order. The sequence has been maintained to reflect the author’s sustained interest in a single imaginative field.
Across the collection, themes of compassion, moral growth, and the porous boundary between life and afterlife recur with quiet insistence. The unseen is not treated as spectacle, but as a setting for ethical attention—how one listens, remembers, and attends to others. Consolation, responsibility, and the persistence of love are balanced with humility about what can be known. The stories consider community as much as solitude, and they dwell on the ways ordinary affections outlast change. Without resolving mysteries, they invite reflection on hope, loss, and recognition, using the imagined beyond as a mirror for conduct and feeling in the present.
Stylistically, Mrs. Oliphant blends the lucidity of domestic realism with a restrained supernatural register. Her narrators speak in a measured, companionable voice, privileging clarity over sensation and intimacy over spectacle. Scenes are sketched with economical detail, and turns of feeling are handled with tact, allowing implications to accumulate rather than being forced. The supernatural elements are rendered in calm, steady tones, so that wonder arises from exact observation and moral resonance. This poise—firmly anchored in everyday speech and habit—gives the cycle its distinctive timbre: a literature of the threshold, where tenderness and sobriety coexist without strain.
Taken together, these works occupy a notable place within Victorian engagements with faith, doubt, and grief. They speak to readers interested in the era’s supernatural fiction while avoiding the violence and excess of Gothic sensationalism. Their endurance lies in a careful balance: speculative imagination tempered by ethical seriousness. By staging encounters at the edge of the visible, the cycle joins a broader nineteenth-century conversation about consolation and duty, yet it retains a personal scale. The significance of the whole exceeds that of any single piece, because the gradual recurrence of images and attitudes furnishes a sustained meditation on hope.
This introduction invites readers to treat the volume as both a sequence and a dwelling place—a set of rooms one may enter and revisit. Whether approaching Mrs. Oliphant for the first time or returning to a familiar voice, you will find an unfaltering attention to human sympathy and a disciplined openness to mystery. The collection’s design encourages pauses between pieces, allowing their afterthoughts to ripen. Without disclosing particular turns, it is fair to say that the journey offered here is contemplative rather than sensational, and that its rewards lie in the quiet persistence of insight across the cycle.
Historical Context
Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (1828–1897), known as Mrs. Oliphant, wrote the cluster of visionary tales gathered as A Little Pilgrim: Stories of the Seen and the Unseen late in a career shaped by Victorian Britain’s religious, social, and publishing revolutions. Born at Wallyford, near Musselburgh, Scotland, she debuted with Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland (1849) and became a mainstay of William Blackwood & Sons in Edinburgh and London. After marrying the artist Francis W. O. Oliphant in 1852 and being widowed in Rome in 1859, she supported an extended family by writing across genres—novels, biographies, histories—while increasingly reflecting on the moral and spiritual questions of her age.
Oliphant’s career unfolded within the nineteenth-century periodical system that encouraged serial fiction and reflective essays. She wrote regularly for Blackwood’s Magazine under John Blackwood (1818–1879), whose stable also included George Eliot, facilitating a shared culture of realist detail and ethical inquiry. The circulating libraries—especially Mudie’s Select Library (founded 1842)—favored three-volume novels and shaped respectable reading tastes that her work helped define. Carlingford novels such as Salem Chapel (1863), The Perpetual Curate (1864), and Miss Marjoribanks (1866) honed her insight into middle-class manners and ecclesiastical politics, insights that later grounded the otherworldly assurance and social texture of the A Little Pilgrim narratives.
The religious ferment of nineteenth-century Britain forms essential context. The Scottish Disruption of 1843, the rise of Evangelicalism, the Oxford Movement in England, and Nonconformist expansion made doctrine and church governance everyday matters. Oliphant’s two-volume The Life of Edward Irving (1862) examined a charismatic Presbyterian who helped inspire the Catholic Apostolic Church, revealing her sympathy for fervor tempered by discipline. She also wrote Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oliphant, his Wife (1891), charting mysticism within respectable society. This sustained engagement with earnest yet contested faith prepared the imaginative ground on which the Little Pilgrim stories treat death, consolation, and communal duty.
Victorian debates over science and belief sharpened the appetite for carefully framed supernatural fiction. After Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and Essays and Reviews (1860) troubled traditional readings of Scripture, “higher criticism” and popular spiritualism spread. By 1882 the Society for Psychical Research in London (Henry Sidgwick, F. W. H. Myers, Edmund Gurney) sought disciplined inquiry into apparitions and afterlife claims. Oliphant positioned her tales near but not within séance culture, favoring an ethical, almost pastoral supernatural akin to but distinct from J. S. Le Fanu’s spectral anxieties or Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunted and the Haunters (1859). Her unseen worlds offer moral clarity more than sensational shocks.
Gendered economics also shaped Oliphant’s art. Widowed at thirty-one, she became a professional writer who negotiated advances, deadlines, and serial installments while raising and later grieving several children between the 1860s and 1890s. Residence in Windsor and long sojourns in London kept her within the metropolis of editors, libraries, and readers, but also within a world of household restraint and philanthropic endeavor. Novels like Phoebe, Junior (1876) and Hester (1883) explore women’s agency in Nonconformist and financial spheres, mapping respectability and risk. The same disciplined empathy informs A Little Pilgrim, in which domestic virtues—care, self-sacrifice, steadfastness—are transposed into a consolatory vision of the hereafter.
Continental travel and historical study broadened Oliphant’s religious and aesthetic frames. Time in Italy with her husband, an artist and stained-glass designer, preceded his death in Rome in 1859, but the country remained a lifelong resource. Works such as The Makers of Florence (1876), The Makers of Venice (1887), and The Makers of Modern Rome (1895) linked art, civic tradition, and sanctity across centuries. The Risorgimento (culminating 1861–1870) and Rome’s modern transformation gave contemporary color to ancient Christian narratives. In the Little Pilgrim sequence, the serene afterlife topography and emphasis on charity carry the temper of European sacred spaces filtered through a British moral imagination.
Social reform and expanding literacy in Britain widened the audience and the moral horizon for Oliphant’s fiction. The 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts, the Elementary Education Act of 1870, and the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882) reshaped citizenship and the family economy. Urban growth and Nonconformist organization fostered cultures of visiting, benevolence, and self-improvement that her Carlingford books anatomize and her unseen-world stories affirm. The language of pilgrimage—pervasive since John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and cherished by Victorians—offered a shared lexicon of trial and hope. A Little Pilgrim adapts that tradition to late-century needs: consolation without sectarian narrowness, duty without despair.
Late-Victorian readers prized refined ghost stories, and Oliphant’s contributions stood alongside works by Vernon Lee, Margaret Veley, and, soon after, Henry James. Arthur Conan Doyle’s spiritualist advocacy and membership in the Society for Psychical Research signaled the period’s earnestness about the unseen, though Oliphant’s restraint kept her nearer pastoral theology than parlour marvels. The Little Pilgrim pieces first circulated in magazines before book publication in the early 1880s, then continued to be reprinted as tastes for afterlife literature persisted. Oliphant died at Windsor on 25 June 1897; her Autobiography and Letters, edited by her cousin Mrs. Harry Coghill (1899), fixed the industrious, reflective life behind these consoling fictions.
