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Textual Seductions: Women's Reading and Writing in Margaret Oliphant's “The Library Window”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Tamar Heller
Tamar Heller
Affiliation:
University of Louisville
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Extract

Margaret oliphants ghost story “The Library Window” (1896) — one of the last works of its author's prolific career — is haunted by images of reading and writing. Visiting her aunt, the young narrator (never named) reads obsessively, perched in the window seat where she witnesses another scene of textuality. Some claim that a window in the college library across the street is only “fictitious panes marked on the wall” (296), yet in a series of increasingly vivid tableaux the girl sees through those panes a young man seated in a study “writing, writing always” (305). So entranced is she by this vision of scholarship, so convinced of its reality, that she is devastated to learn the window is indeed a fake and the young man a ghost who appears to her because of a curse on the female members of her family: he was killed by the brothers of another young girl — the narrator's ancestor — when they mistakenly assumed he was responding to her flirtatious overtures as she waved to him across the street.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 23 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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