Margaret Oliphant and the ghost in the window
Margaret Oliphant, 'The Library Window'
A young woman is staying with her aunt in Scotland while recovering from an unnamed illness. There is little to do all day but read and stare out the window. She becomes fixated by a large window across the street that belongs to the old library and that local people claim is just an optical illusion brought on by the shifting light throughout the day. However, the longer she looks at it, the more she begins to see a room, its furniture, and, finally, a young man writing at a desk.
Now read on:
Yes, there he was! I had not been deceived. I knew then, when I looked across, that this was what I had been looking for all the time--that I had known he was there, and had been waiting for him, every time there was that flicker of movement in the room--him and no one else. And there at last, just as I had expected, he was. I don't know that in reality I ever had expected him, or any one: but this was what I felt when, suddenly looking into that curious dim room, I saw him there.
He was sitting in the chair, which he must have placed for himself, or which some one else in the dead of night when nobody was looking must have set for him, in front of the escritoire--with the back of his head towards me, writing. The light fell upon him from the left hand, and therefore upon his shoulders and the side of his head, which, however, was too much turned away to show anything of his face. Oh, how strange that there should be some one staring at him as I was doing, and he never to turn his head, to make a movement! If any one stood and looked at me, were I in the soundest sleep that ever was, I would wake, I would jump up, I would feel it through everything. But there he sat and never moved. You are not to suppose, though I said the light fell upon him from the left hand, that there was very much light. There never is in a room you are looking into like that across the street; but there was enough to see him by--the outline of his figure dark and solid, seated in the chair, and the fairness of his head visible faintly, a clear spot against the dimness. I saw this outline against the dim gilding of the frame of the large picture which hung on the farther wall.
What we love about this passage...
The narrator is so insistent about what she has 'seen' in that room that she makes us want to believe in her vision too. We love the way she speaks directly to us ('You are not to suppose'), and her increasing agitation throughout this scene contrasts with the quiet figure writing at his desk. There is just enough spookiness to provoke a thrill, letting us experience the phantasmagoric within the routine patterns of everyday life.
Oliphant's narrative taps into the Victorian fascination for ghost stories. It also captures the cultural anxiety during the period about the dangers of reading for impressionable young women--the fear that their imaginations would become over-excited and result in hysteria. It's no coincidence that in Oliphant's story, the delusional young woman has her head in some novel for hours on end...
SPOILER ALERT: Who is that young man she sees across the road? how will she ever meet him? Later in the story, she is invited to a party at the old library, on St John's Eve (midsummer's eve, the summer solstice). She wears her finest dress and, in a state of great excitement, enters the room she has been staring at for so long--only to find that there is no window, just a solid brick wall. The play of the strong midsummer light, and her own feverish imagination, produced the illusion of the room and the young man that so deeply entranced her.
The way the passage plays with the motifs of light, sight, and insight is especially striking. Earlier in the story the narrator admits: 'it was some superiority in me which made it so clear to me....some particular insight in me which gave clearness to my sight.' Oliphant captures the young person's yearning to be exceptional, to see things that others cannot see.
About the author
Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) was a Scottish writer who wrote more than 90 novels as well as non-fiction and short stories. She wrote primarily out of financial need, as her husband died early on and she had to support not only her three children but also various members of her wider family. Virginia Woolf used Oliphant as an example of how important it was for a woman writer to have financial independence, so that her talent could be properly sustained and nurtured.
To read alongside...
'The Yellow Wall-Paper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a chilling tale of what extended convalescence and confinement can do to the mind. Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw likewise conjures apparitions that seem utterly real.
Several of Oliphant's contemporaries wrote tales of the supernatural that can leave a reader shivering--prime examples are 'The Old Nurse's Story' by Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens's 'The Signalman' and 'The Chimes'. Compared to more violent and horror-laced Gothic fiction, like Dracula by Bram Stoker or R.L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, these tales are suggestive rather than graphic, gently prodding the limits of realism. Some interesting and diverse modern examples of the supernatural include Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Octavia Butler's Kindred.
The film Rear Window, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, centres on the same central themes as Oliphant's ghost story: James Stewart plays a man recovering from a broken leg who spends most of his time staring at the windows of his neighbours and becomes obsessed by what he sees going on. Is a murder being committed in one of those rooms, or is his mind playing tricks...?
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