Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) was born in Wallyford, near Edinburgh. Her first novel, Passages in the Life of Margaret Maitland (1849), achieved some success and was followed two years later with further novels. She began contributing to magazines including Blackwoods, for whom she was to write hundreds of short stories, essays, articles and serialised novels such as Katie Stewart (1853). Some of Oliphant's most powerful stories are her supernatural tales, compiled in A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and Unseen (1885).