Short novella which first appeared as an amateur theatrical drama produced and acted by Dickens in 1857, and this version in prose in 1875. It combines arctic exploration (Franklin search vintage) with a love conflict between two explorers on the same expedition, one accepted and another rejected by the same young woman. The woman claims Second Sight to know the outcome of the conflict (she’s wrong), probably reflecting Kane’s experience with the Fox sisters and telepathy.
p. 569: …Mrs. Crayford [the young woman’s guardian] rises, and puts down the volume that she has been reading. It is a record of explorations in the Arctic seas. The time has gone by when the two lonely women could take an interest in subjects not connected with their own anxieties. Now, when hope is fast failing them—now, when their last news of the Wanderer and the Sea-mew is news that is more than two years old—they can read of nothing, they can think of nothing, but dangers and discoveries, losses and rescues in the terrible Polar seas.
p. 572-73: Vainly she [Mrs. Crayford] recalls to memory all that the doctors have said to her, in speaking of Clara in the state of trance. What she vaguely dreads for the lost man whom she loves is mingled in her mind with what she is constantly reading, of trials, dangers, and escapes in the Arctic seas. The most startling things that she may say or do are all attributable to this cause, and may all be explained in this way. So the doctors have spoken; and, thus far, Mrs. Crayford has shared their view. It is only to-night that the girl’s words ring in her ear, with a strange prophetic sound in them. It is only tonight that she asks herself: Is Clara present, in the spirit, with our loved and lost ones in the lonely North? Can mortal vision see the dead and living in the solitudes of the Frozen Deep?