This chapter aims to identify some of the most important writers working inside Scotland within the last twenty-five years: it is complemented by Flora Alexander's chapter, ‘Contemporary Fiction III: The Anglo-Scots’. Although its period of reference begins around 1970, it aims to set this writing within the overall framework of Scottish women's fiction generally, and within the modern period particularly. Thus reference will be made to writers within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose work has significantly contributed to what is happening in the present and especially to writers whose work has not hitherto been discussed either in chapters on particular authors or in period chapters. Where writers like Naomi Mitchison or Muriel Spark have been discussed in previous chapters, the treatment here will of course be more limited and general.

The achievement of contemporary women writers of fiction has arguably been the most substantial of all achievements in Scottish women's writing. It is outstanding in its new confidence in handling a wide range of genres from social realism and satire to recognisably Scottish versions of magic realism, surrealism and historical fantasy, and its willingness to explore the challenges and problems facing women in their personal development, in their relationships with other women, men, families and society generally, and - increasingly - in relation to history and nationality. Given the amount of writers and fiction of the period, and in keeping with the ethos of the volume as a whole, the essay does not seek to follow any particular theoretical approach or single thematic argument; instead, seeking to give wide general information, its organisation falls into three main stages. Firstly, there is consideration or what has probably been the essential preoccupation of the fiction since its first clearly Scottish articulation, in novels like Susan Ferrier's Marriage (1818) down through later nineteenth and early twentieth-century fiction to the present, that of personal and sexual identity and the struggle to assert rights of sex and gender within an exceptionally male-dominated society traditionally suspicious of women's voices speaking outside the home. Given this attempt to set the work of the contemporary writers within a very broad Scottish context, the second part of the chapter examines five of the main thematic and formal concerns of the new fiction, together with general discussion of how effectively particular writers exemplify and illustrate these.