"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."---The Wall Street Journal<BR><BR>"A highly curious book---curious in a higher sense, as Colegate shows herself half-unwillingly fascinated by many of the visionaries and eccentrics she meets along the way, and manages, in her meditative and subtle prose, to recapture the very rapture and otherworldliness she describes."---Pico Iyer, The New York Review of Books<BR><BR>From Lao-tse and the Buddha, St. Antony and the early Celtic hermits, through 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 revaluation 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.