A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses - Softcover

In a series of essays, an acclaimed novelist delves deeply into the spiritual life, reflecting on ascetism in the works of Lao Tzu, the Desert Fathers, Wordsworth, Thoreau, and others. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

"Dazzling...It's a great pleasure to ramble with the author through varied wisdom about a place that exists in everyone's heart, the small strip of territory between solitude and loneliness where peace is easily found, and easily lost." -Michael Joseph Gross, Amazon.com (editorial review) "A durable examination of the great and enduring human urge to set oneself apart in order to get at the heart of things." -Michael Glover, The Financial Times "She casts her net wide, catching fish of every kind: holy men and women, poets, travelers, naturalists, misanthropes, and misfits. Colegate's interest is, at bottom, personal. As a novelist she prizes solitude and regrets the encroachments of modern life. She is... engaged and engaging, describing the people she admires, the literature she loves, and the places that have inspired both." -The Economist "This is a delicious book, not least because it has a brisk, even secular, approach to a subject too often approached in a spirit of gushing awe. [Colegate] is adding to a select literature of spiritual tourism (most of which she usefully cites) among pilgrims engaged on 'the solitary voyage of the practiced mind into the void.'" -Richard D. North, The Independent "Colegate sees, and wittily conveys, the funny side of her subject, but it is its serious face that engages her. Her character sketches of her chosen saints, sages, and holy fools are precise and vivid. She says modestly that she is not competent to write about 'the Matter of God, which is the most interesting subject in the world,' but she can and does write with delicate exactitude about landscape, about birds, about silence, and about the ecstatic self-transcendence that is the solitary's reward." -Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Sunday Times "An engrossing book." -P. J. Kavanagh, The Spectator "It is impossible not to be moved by these stories and the author's evident delight in them." -Murrough O'Brien, The Independent on Sunday "Colegate...interweaves historical accounts with descriptions of her own wanderings in the footsteps of celebrated hermits and encounters with their present-day counterparts...She has restored a hermit's cell, both literally in her own garden and metaphorically for the reader, with her sympathetic evocation of a distant and often alien way of life." -Michael Arditti, The Times"