A Beleaguered City

This is one of only two supernatural novels by prolific nineteenth-century writer Margaret Oliphant. Set in the town of Semur, in the Bourgogne region of France, it is a powerful, sombre fantasy relating the events that unfold after the settlement is besieged by the dead. A departure from her ubiquitous realistic tales of everyday middle-class Victorian life, the novel is presumably inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem of the same name, itself widely available online and well worth seeking out. The story was well-received on publication and is the first in Oliphant's series of 'Tales of the Seen and Unseen'.