The Open Door, and the Portrait

Two stories of the seen and the unseen. In The Open Door a colonel back from India takes a house near Edinburgh, and his son falls ill with terror of a voice that cries at night in a ruined doorway in the grounds; the father goes out in the dark to hear it for himself. In The Portrait the picture of a young man's dead mother, hung at last in his hard father's house, seems to call him — with seizures he cannot control — to take the part of an orphaned girl with her face. Oliphant wrote ninety-eight novels to keep a household that kept collapsing on her, burying her husband and children as she went, and these quiet stories about the dead are among the things she is best remembered for. Fifty-eight plates, among them Grimshaw's moonlit lanes and McCulloch's Highland castles, carry the same twilight and old stone that haunt these two stories of the seen and the unseen.