With the two tales gathered here, Margaret Oliphant opened the door into Carlingford — the closely observed English provincial town that would become the setting of her finest fiction. First published in 1863, The Rector and The Doctor's Family launched the Chronicles of Carlingford, the sequence that won her comparison with George Eliot and stands among the lasting achievements of the Victorian novel.

In The Rector, Mr. Morley Proctor comes to Carlingford in middle age after a lifetime among the manuscripts and quiet of All Souls College, Oxford. He is learned and conscientious and entirely unprepared for what a parish actually asks. Summoned to a dying woman's bedside, he discovers with a shock that he cannot do it — that the office he holds demands something he does not possess. The tale's quiet greatness lies in his honest, humbling recognition of his own unfitness, and the dignity of his withdrawal.

The Doctor's Family is warmer, funnier, and richer. Young Dr. Edward Rider is building a modest practice in Carlingford, his name shadowed by his idle, sponging brother Fred. Then a ship from Australia brings the family Fred had abandoned: his peevish wife Susan, their three children, and Susan's small, fierce, tirelessly capable sister, Nettie Underwood. Nettie carries the whole helpless household on her own shoulders by sheer will — and Edward Rider, moved and confounded in equal measure, falls in love with her. But Nettie has bound herself to a duty she will not lay down, and the story turns on a hard question: whether a woman so given over to others has any right left to a happiness of her own.

Told in Oliphant's quiet, ironic, deeply humane realism, these two short works are the perfect introduction to Carlingford — a study of vocation and self-knowledge, of duty and love, and of the thankless capability so often demanded of women, set at the threshold of one of the richest small worlds in Victorian fiction.