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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Open Door, and the Portrait,' Mrs. Oliphant weaves a rich tapestry of social observation and psychological complexity, masterfully exploring the nuances of human relationships against the backdrop of Victorian society. The stories encapsulate her characteristic blend of realism and emotional depth, delving into themes of isolation, societal expectation, and the haunting nature of memory. With a keen eye for detail and a unique narrative style that interlaces dialogue with introspective commentary, Oliphant invites readers to navigate the delicate interplay between perception and reality, challenging them to confront their own assumptions about identity and belonging. Mrs. Oliphant, a prolific Victorian author and a keen chronicler of societal change, drew from her own experiences of loss and resilience to inform her storytelling. Born in 1828, her literary career spanned several decades, during which she grappled with the complexities of gender and class. Her insightful observations and deep empathy for her characters reflect a life lived in the intersections of societal expectation and personal desire, making her work both poignant and significant in understanding her era. This collection is highly recommended for readers interested in Victorian literature and the exploration of psychological themes. 'The Open Door, and the Portrait' not only showcases Oliphant's mastery of narrative but also offers timeless reflections on the struggles inherent in human connections, making it an essential read for those seeking a deeper understanding of this profound literary landscape. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Open Door, and the Portrait
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the hinge between familiar rooms and the vast, unaccountable unseen, these two tales trace how love, conscience, and perception are tested when the thresholds we trust—an ordinary doorway, a painted likeness—begin to answer back, compelling characters to choose between the comforts of certainty and the deeper obligations of attention, responsibility, and moral courage, while the quiet geometry of domestic life tilts into mystery and the past presses forward, not with spectacle, but with the intimate authority of memory, grief, and duty made visible, audible, and urgent in spaces that should be safe, yet prove to be the stage of the soul.
Written by Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), widely known in her time as Mrs. Oliphant, these companion pieces belong to the late Victorian tradition of supernatural short fiction. She was a prolific Scottish author whose work spans domestic realism, historical narrative, and the uncanny. The Open Door and The Portrait reflect that range, setting the extraordinary within recognizably ordinary households. First appearing in nineteenth-century periodicals and reprinted thereafter, the stories are concise, elegant studies in atmosphere and moral inquiry. Their scenes unfold in a country house and in interiors shaped by art and memory, where the everyday texture of life becomes the medium through which the inexplicable is felt.
The Open Door draws its power from an apparently simple situation: at a house long settled and well governed, one architectural threshold refuses to behave like the rest. Noises, impressions, and a pattern of disturbance concentrate at this place, unsettling family and servants alike. The narrator, practical and responsible, undertakes watchful vigils, gathers testimonies, and tests ordinary explanations before conceding that something more than draft or rumor is at work. The result is not a catalogue of shocks but a steadily deepening engagement with duty, fear, and compassion, as the household’s response becomes the story’s true subject and the doorway a measure of character.
The Portrait turns from passageways to the stillness of an image, exploring how a painted face can become a living presence in the rooms it inhabits. A work of art—anchored in family history, patronage, or private fascination—begins to exert an influence that is difficult to name yet impossible to ignore. Questions arise about resemblance, intention, and the power of representation to shape desire, judgment, and identity. As observation sharpens, those who live with the picture are drawn into a web of associations that binds aesthetics to conscience, the visual to the ethical, and the surface of beauty to the deeper currents it may conceal or reveal.
Readers can expect a poised, lucid narrative voice that prefers suggestion to spectacle. Oliphant’s prose balances calm description with precisely placed moments of unease, allowing light, weather, silence, and the arrangement of rooms to carry meaning. She often favors reflective, first-person or closely observed perspectives that treat witnesses with sympathy and skepticism in equal measure. The pace is measured, the plotting economical, the tone humane. Scenes accumulate like evidence laid gently on a table, and the uncanny is rendered plausible through observant detail and moral seriousness. Rather than resolve every ambiguity, the stories invite readers to weigh impressions and inhabit uncertainty with intelligence and care.
Across both tales, several themes resonate: the obligations of guardianship and kinship; the tension between skepticism and belief; the way places and objects store emotional histories; and the ethical demands that arise when rational explanation runs thin. The open door becomes a figure for thresholds we all face—between past and present, fear and duty—while the portrait speaks to how images shape our sense of self and others. Contemporary readers may recognize in these fictions questions about grief, memory, mental fortitude, and the responsibilities of attention. The stories model a kind of listening and looking that respects mystery without surrendering moral clarity.
Approached together, The Open Door and The Portrait offer a concentrated experience of Victorian supernatural art at its most humane: intimate in scale, deliberate in rhythm, and rich in implication. They reward slow reading and reflection, their climaxes arising less from shocks than from choices. For readers new to Mrs. Oliphant, this pairing is an inviting threshold to her broader achievement; for longtime admirers of ghost stories, it is a reminder that the uncanny can be most persuasive when it inhabits the familiar. Expect atmosphere rather than gore, ethical inquiry rather than neat answers, and the lingering afterimage of rooms you will not quickly forget.
Synopsis (Selection)
A family takes a winter lease of a rambling country house, seeking quiet after years of movement and service abroad. The father, who narrates, hopes for calm routine, but the place carries a local reputation for strange disturbances. Servants speak in low tones of an open door on the hillside and a voice that rides the wind at night. The house itself is comfortable, yet the grounds include ruins and a disused portion that villagers avoid. Practical by temperament, the father dismisses alarm, but he notes unease in the household as evenings draw in and the weather turns severe.
The first persistent incident is a cry heard after dark, thin and piercing, as if from a child lost outdoors. Following the sound, the father ventures toward an old wall and a half-ruined building where, briefly, a door appears to stand ajar. In daylight, the place seems ordinary, locked and deserted; by night, it acquires a treacherous life of its own. The contrast unsettles him without altering his resolve to test and explain. He marks distances, studies wind and echo, and tries to identify any shepherd or stray traveler who might be the source.
The disturbance touches his household more directly when his young son becomes aware of the voice and cannot put it from his mind. The boy is drawn between dread and a compelling sympathy that he cannot articulate. Servants refuse certain errands after dusk, and one or two ask to leave. The father consults sensible allies, including a physician and a local clergyman, to steady nerves and anchor the event in reason. He keeps the family routine intact while quietly preparing to confront whatever stands behind the recurring cry and the elusive open door.
Armed with lanterns and accompanied by a trusted attendant, he adopts a methodical watch. They map the grounds, note the hours when the voice is most likely to rise, and test how sound travels over the frost. Several times they glimpse, where there should be blank wall, the blurred shape of a doorway with darkness beyond. Their vigilance sharpens when the boy, troubled in sleep, seems drawn toward the hill. A narrow escape convinces the father that waiting is no longer possible; the time has come to uncover the human origin of the haunting and set it right.
The inquiry turns toward the estate’s past: neglected records, an old dispute, and a memory of a child once missed and never properly accounted for. By pursuing these threads, the father arrives at an explanation that belongs to ordinary life rather than legend. A restitution is made, simple and sufficient, and the nightly disturbance fades without ceremony. The household regains its balance, and the family departs with gratitude to have lived quietly again. The tale closes on themes of parental duty, compassion for the lost, and the thin line between what is unseen and what is merely overlooked.
The second tale shifts to a town house with a long gallery of family pictures. Among them hangs a portrait of a young woman whose presence draws the narrator’s attention. The painting is finely executed, its gaze disconcertingly direct; in certain lights its expression seems to change. Family members mention the sitter only in fragments, suggesting a story that has hardened into cautionary legend. The narrator, skeptical of superstition but alert to atmosphere, observes how the household orients itself around the canvas, as if the past, framed and silent, still indexes present choices.
A young kinswoman comes to stay, and her resemblance to the portrait’s sitter, however slight, lends new charge to the air. Comparisons arise unbidden, shaping expectations about conduct, marriage, and the weight of a name. The portrait becomes a quiet interlocutor in parlors and corridors, its presence invoked to steady or to sway. The household’s conversations reveal a tension between honoring memory and allowing the living their freedom. The narrator listens, noting how stories attach to objects, and how a painting can come to bear responsibility that rightly belongs to persons and their acts.
Curiosity, tempered by respect, leads to a discreet inquiry into the picture’s provenance. Old letters and bills are examined, dates compared, and recollections cross-checked against the painting’s signature. An inconsistency emerges that suggests the family legend may rest on a misreading rather than on settled fact. Meanwhile, decisions about the young kinswoman’s future press forward, and the portrait’s tacit authority is invoked once more. The narrator, balancing feeling with evidence, prepares to set out what has been found, expecting that a clearer account of the past will ease the pressure of expectation.
A quiet confrontation in the gallery resolves the matter. Facts, gently presented, alter the meaning attached to the portrait and shift the ground of present choice. With misunderstanding dispelled, the painting returns to its proper place as a work remembered rather than a force obeyed. The young woman’s path is chosen in light, not shadow, and the household settles back into equilibrium. Taken together, the two tales trace a consistent theme: the past can trouble the present, but steady compassion joined to clear attention can close what should be closed and dignify what ought to endure as memory.
Historical Context
Mrs. Oliphant’s The Open Door, and the Portrait is set within the moral and material textures of the late Victorian world. The Open Door unfolds on a Scottish country estate—often associated with a fictive house like Brentwood on the Firth of Forth, near Edinburgh—where old ramparts and a ruined tower neighbor improved lawns, game belts, and carriage drives typical of nineteenth-century gentry seats. The Portrait moves to the Italian peninsula, commonly Rome or a similar city of palazzi, studios, and galleries in the decades after unification (1870s–1880s). In both locales, domestic interiors, religious spaces, and landscapes act as thresholds between modern life and a persistent, haunted past.
The era’s culture of mourning and the parallel rise of spiritualism form a defining historical backdrop. After 1848, when the Fox sisters’ rappings in Hydesville, New York, ignited transatlantic interest, spiritualism spread vigorously in Britain. Scottish-born medium Daniel Dunglas Home conducted séances for aristocratic circles in London in the 1850s–1860s; the London Dialectical Society issued a report on spiritual phenomena in 1871; and the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers to investigate apparitions with scientific rigor. Simultaneously, Victorian bereavement norms—black attire, memorial photography, locks of hair—responded to high mortality from tuberculosis and epidemic disease. Infant and child deaths remained tragically common; in industrial towns, infant mortality often exceeded 150 per 1,000 live births in the 1860s. Margaret Oliphant’s life intersected these currents. Widowed in Rome in 1859 when her husband, the stained-glass artist Francis Wilson Oliphant, died of tuberculosis, she later endured the loss of several children and wrote extensively about the unseen world in the 1870s–1890s. The Open Door channels the audibility of grief—most memorably a child’s pleading voice—into a scenario where communal witness and prayer seek moral closure rather than sensational marvels. It is a case study in the late-Victorian negotiation between faith, skepticism, and the desire for evidential consolation. The Portrait, by staging a troubling presence in or around an image, participates in contemporaneous debates about whether art mediates memory and spirit or merely reflects psychological suggestion. Both tales thus mirror a society testing boundaries between private sorrow, public ritual, and putative scientific inquiry into the supernatural.
The Disruption of 1843, when Thomas Chalmers and about 474 ministers left the Church of Scotland to form the Free Church, reshaped Scottish religious authority and local governance. It sprang from conflicts over patronage and spiritual independence, and its effects endured through the century in parish life, education, and philanthropy. The Open Door’s emphasis on conscience, communal responsibility, and the efficacy of prayer in resolving a haunting reflects this Presbyterian inheritance. By presenting lay initiative alongside clerical presence, the tale dramatizes the moral seriousness, self-scrutiny, and collective duty cultivated in post-Disruption Scotland.
Public health crises and child welfare reform provide another salient context. Britain faced cholera epidemics in 1848–1849, 1853–1854, and 1866, spurring sanitary measures. In Scotland, the Public Health (Scotland) Act of 1867 created local authorities for drainage, water supply, and disease control; the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872 established School Boards and compulsory schooling, reshaping family routines. Severe winters and poverty compounded risk for children. The Open Door’s tragedy of a child exposed to cold at night resonates with these realities, turning a spectral cry into an indictment of neglect and a reminder of the fragile protections afforded by emergent public health and educational systems.
Transformations in Scottish landed society and the memory of the feudal past also matter. Railways (the Edinburgh–Glasgow line opened in 1842; the Forth Bridge in 1890) tightened links between estates and cities, while nineteenth-century “improvements” reorganized grounds, tenants, and sport. Simultaneously, ruins of earlier tower houses and earthworks—material survivals of sixteenth and seventeenth-century conflict—punctuated modern parks. The Open Door situates its haunting at just such a liminal site, where a literal threshold marks a moral one: the obligations of paternal authority within the estate order. The tension between polished house and haunted rampart serves as a historical allegory for inherited duties under pressure from modernization.
The Italian Risorgimento, culminating in 1861 with the Kingdom of Italy under Victor Emmanuel II and in 1870 with the capture of Rome at Porta Pia by General Raffaele Cadorna, reconfigured Rome’s political and cultural life. The fall of papal temporal power and the city’s designation as national capital (1871) transformed patronage, church-state relations, and the artistic economy. British expatriates clustered near Piazza di Spagna and Via del Babuino; All Saints’ Anglican Church in Rome was consecrated in 1882. The Portrait’s engagement with an unsettling image within a Roman palazzo reflects this milieu, juxtaposing Protestant visitors’ sensibilities with Catholic iconography and newly national Italian civic identity.
Mass tourism and the nineteenth-century art market shaped Anglo-Italian encounters. Thomas Cook organized British tours to Italy by the mid-1860s; the Mont Cenis Tunnel (opened 1871) reduced travel time. Institutions such as the South Kensington Museum (founded 1852, later the V&A) promoted connoisseurship, while dealers and copyists supplied portraits and Old Masters to collectors. Portraits signaled lineage, virtue, and social credit in both Britain and Italy. The Portrait harnesses that social function—suggesting how an image could authenticate, ensnare, or morally implicate its sitters and viewers—thus mirroring a period when status, taste, and identity were negotiated through the acquisition and display of art.
Together, the tales operate as social and political critiques. The Open Door exposes failures of paternal duty and communal vigilance, showing how genteel respectability can conceal negligence with mortal consequences, particularly for children. It rebukes complacency in a society that prided itself on improvement yet relied on prayer only after preventable harm. The Portrait critiques the possessive gaze and the transactional culture surrounding lineage and marriage, while probing Anglo-Protestant anxieties toward Catholic spaces and power. Both works interrogate class privilege, gendered authority, and religious certainty, urging a reformed ethic of responsibility that matches modern progress with humane accountability.
