Margaret Oliphant 
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 

This early work by Margaret Oliphant was originally published in 1900 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. ‘A Beleaguered City’ has a luminous intensity, a psychological realism and a gripping evocation of place. The story tells us about the citizens of a town who are driven outside their walls when their dead invade their city and push them out. The citizens are terrified by nothing but a deep sense of thousands of dead people who they once knew inhabiting their houses, streets, intimate spaces. Margaret Oliphant was born in Wallyford, Scotland in 1828. In 1849 she had her first novel published: Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland. By the late 1850’s, Oliphant’s husband passed away, leaving her almost entirely without resources, and therefore left to support her three remaining children by her own literary activity. Her fictional works encompass domestic realism, the historical novel and tales of the supernatural.