'I bought for 3s. a novel by Mrs Oliphant, ''An English Squire'', with the same irritable young man one knows so well. A very clever description of the feelings of a widow on losing a dull husband she did not much care for...'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Darwin Print: Book
My dear Mrs Oliphant, I address you freely, because I have a full heart just now; and I had rather speak foolishly out of my enthusiasm than hold my tongue afterwards in a state of clear and cowardly common sense.
How you wrote A Beleaguered City, I cannot think; I had not supposed it had been in you; but God bless you, in all soberness, for having done so. I look in vain for anything like it, since the Pilgrim’s Progress − or before. How it might read to posterity, is a thing neither I nor you can tell; but to your contemporaries, or to some of them, it will be truly good news. And this, after all, is the great affair; to these, we speak with comprehensible accents; to posterity, or to all but a few of them, nous autres morts will speak a flat, unresonant dialect.
Whether I like the Maire more than Lecanus, or more than the curé, I cannot tell. They are all three admirably touched, and full of significance to the main issue. All their humours tell; they show our Babel, toiling here a while, as we hope, in the midst of a clearer universe. Shelley has said something in poetry, which youe have said over again, and most pleasantly glossed upon, in the idiosyncrasies of all your characters: ‘Life like a dome of many coloured glass (I quote from a bad, a heartless memory) stains the white radiance of eternity’.
I have thought often, how many arrows an author shoots into the air − I daresay, so have you. In the Beleaguered City, you have lodged some three or four in my heart. I have cried heartily; I feel the better for my tears; and I want to thank you. Let that excuse this otherwise inexcusable letter and believe me gratefully your very much obliged reader
Robert Louis Stevenson
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Serial / periodical
