A Pelican in the Wilderness Author:Isabel Colegate "Few books contain a cast of characters as fascinating as those who populate A Pelican in the Wilderness, Isabel Colegate's charming meander through the history of hermits and solitaries. Elegantly written...a small gem of a book."-- Wall Street Journal From Lao-tse and the Buddha, St. Anthony and the early Celtic hermits, through... more » Rousseau, Thoreau, Ruskin and down to the present day, certain gifted persons, each in his own way, have shown a vocation for living alone and apart, finding in simplicity and attention to Nature a spiritual space to be explored and rejoiced in. Others, retreating from the world in scorn or cut off from it by scandal, have found that solitude is Hell, a pit of melancholy and morbid fancy. In this, her first work of nonfiction, novelist Isabel Colegate gives us the lives of the solitaries--male and female, medieval and modern, divinely inspired and patently fraudulent. But this is no mere gallery of saints and sinners, poets and misanthropes. It is also a re-valuation of solitude for our times, and a reminder that it is in solitude that the soul meets itself, refreshes itself, and from there goes out to join the communal dance.« less