A Beleaguered City

A Beleaguered City is Margaret Oliphant’s 1879 supernatural novella, one of the most respected works of Victorian ghost fiction and one of Oliphant’s most distinctive contributions to the genre. The novella is set in the small French town of Semur in Burgundy and is told as a series of accounts by various townspeople describing the strange three days when the dead returned to the town and forced all of the living inhabitants out into the surrounding countryside.

The central premise is unusual for the ghost story genre. Rather than a single haunting or a single ghost, the entire population of the town’s cemetery, the dead of generations of Semur families, returns one summer day and silently takes possession of the town. The living inhabitants find themselves unable to enter their own streets, their own houses, their own places of business. They are not directly threatened by the dead. They are simply prevented from entering the town that the dead have claimed. The townspeople gather in the surrounding fields and try to figure out what to do, what the dead actually want, and how the situation is going to be resolved.

Margaret Oliphant tells the story through the rotating accounts of the various townspeople, including the mayor Martin Dupin, the parish priest Father Eustace, the wealthy magistrate Paul Lecamus, and various other residents whose perspectives on the strange events differ in ways that reflect their respective backgrounds and beliefs. The supernatural premise is treated with the kind of careful psychological observation that distinguishes Oliphant’s serious fiction, with the various witnesses interpreting the events through their respective religious, scientific, and personal frameworks.

The theological and moral weight of the novella is significant. Oliphant uses the situation to ask serious questions about the relationship between the living and the dead, about what the dead might still want from those who have outlived them, about the responsibilities the living have to the memory and the moral example of those who have gone before, and about the various ways the contemporary nineteenth century world had been failing the standards that the dead represent.

A Beleaguered City has remained one of Oliphant’s most respected works and one of the most distinctive Victorian supernatural novellas. The story has been anthologized many times in collections of Victorian ghost fiction and has continued to be read and admired by readers of the genre.

For readers interested in Victorian ghost fiction, in Margaret Oliphant’s wider catalogue, or in the literature of the supernatural in nineteenth century English writing, A Beleaguered City is essential.