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 and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1887. Octavo, pp. [i-vii] viii [1] 2-267 [268-270: blank], original black binder's cloth, spine panel stamped in gold, top and fore-edges untrimmed, bottom edge trimmed, plain endpapers. First printing of the colonial edition with "Macmillan's Colonial Library" at head of title. The domestic edition was published by Macmillan and Co. in London in 1879 (with title page dated 1880). "... the most completely sustained of all her longer tales, A BELEAGUERED CITY stands at the peak of Oliphant's art. Written fifteen years after the shock of her daughter's death, it underscores the obsessive concerns of her supernatural fiction, almost all of which presents in dramatic form the insistent hope and prayer that beyond this life there is a territory of the Unseen, where the Dead are enabled to work out their ultimate Christianized salvation, and these Dead continue to care for us who remain here in the Seen, though they may be able to communicate only with innocents and children." - Bleiler (ed), Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, pp. 263-4. Wilson, Shadows in the Attic, p. 395. Bleiler (1978), p. 150 (citing a 1879 George Munro piracy). Reginald 10964. Early owner's name stamped on the endpapers. Cloth lightly worn at spine ends and corners, a very good copy. An important book and like the domestic printing, a very scarce book. (#169878).
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