A Little Pilgrim: Stories of the Seen and the Unseen

Margaret Oliphant Wilson OliphantProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.6
Word count
138K words
Chapters
14

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Spirit TravelerFaith ReflectionSpiritual PracticeSpiritual ComfortDeath and EternityTender SentimentPilgrim AllegoryDream NarrativeReligious AllegoryVictorian Era

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.A Little Pilgrim: Stories of the Seen and the Unseen by Mrs. OliphantAuthor: Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret), 1828-1897,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Nov 1, 2003

Editor's review

This collection of short stories is among Mrs. Oliphant's more representative late works, centering on the theme of "the seen and the unseen" and bearing a spiritual narrative mode along with the sentimentality characteristic of the Victorian era. Its value lies not in strong dramatic conflict but in its restrained prose, which explores the blurred boundary between life and death and stitches everyday experience to transcendental imagination. The style is slow-paced and introspective, suited to quiet, unhurried reading that lets one savor the narrator's gentle speculation about the beyond. For readers studying spiritual themes or women's writing in nineteenth-century English literature, this is a text worth noting. As a public-domain eBook from Project Gutenberg, it is easily accessible and also makes light reading material for reading the English original.

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Reading tips

  1. Read one piece through first to get a feel for the language, then go back and look up unfamiliar words paragraph by paragraph, rather than getting bogged down in annotations from the start.
  2. Treat each piece as a standalone short chapter and pause between them to sense the recurring echoes of the theme.
  3. While reading, note the narrator's wording about death and memory and make brief excerpts.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a short story collection? The subtitle indicates it is a collection of short stories. The pieces are relatively independent, so it need not be read continuously in order and is suitable for reading in installments.
How difficult is the English original? It is nineteenth-century English prose, with rather long sentences and period-flavored vocabulary, so there is a certain threshold. It is advisable to read slowly with a dictionary and not to treat it as a beginner's text.
Do I need to understand the religious background first? Systematic knowledge is not necessary, but the work involves spiritual imagination about life and death, so basic familiarity with the relevant cultural background will make reading smoother. Where something is unclear, you may skim past it and focus on the overall impression.

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About the author

Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant Author · British (Scottish) · 1828–1897

Mrs. Oliphant (Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant, 1828–1897) was a prolific Scottish novelist, historical writer and biographer of the Victorian era. Born in Wallyford, she gained fame in 1849 with Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland. In 1852 she married her cousin Frank Oliphant; widowed in 1859, she supported her children by her pen and published more than a hundred works in her lifetime. The library holds 90 of her works, including the Carlingford Chronicles, Salem Chapel, Miss Marjoribanks, supernatural tales, Hester, Kirsteen and the autobiography The Days of My Life. She is known for her delicate, humorous portrayals of small-town life and for her historical and biographical writing, and stands as a representative professional woman writer of the Victorian period.