The years 1989 and 1990 saw the publication of Margaret Elphinstone's A Sparrow's Flight, Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing; Sian Hay ton's Cells of Knowledge, Alison Kennedy's Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, Joan Lingard's The Women's House and Dilys Rose's short-story collection, Our Lady of the Pickpockets. Taken in conjunction with work around this time from writers like Barker, Fell, Ross and Owens there was a clear signal that a significant new development in women's writing in Scotland was taking place, in which there was a heightened consciousness of the need to explore female identity in relation to past, present and future. Hayton's fiction, for example, looked back to Celtic concepts of womanhood, imagining an older integration of male-female co-operation in work and family which the Christian church was to destroy; The Trick is to Keep Breathing explored present-day pressures surrounding women in urban society by looking at a woman, struggling to reintegrate her mind and life after the tragic death of her lover; Elphinstone's The Incomer and A Sparrow's Flight moved into the future, conjecturing as to future roles and identities for women in a post-nuclear holocaust society. And since then several women have produced an impressive body of work which deserves fuller consideration than given in the previous chapter. This chapter introduces the novels and short stories of seven of the home Scottish writers; the next deals with the work of some of the Anglo-Scottish writers.

Margaret Elphinstone

Underpinning Elphinstone's first two novels is the premise that Britain has suffered a great nuclear disaster which has taken it back to dark ages, with isolated communities around the Borders and Galloway struggling to develop. She does not record this, and the reader is left to find this out through hints and clues, the strongest of which emerge in A Sparrow's Flight (1989), with its journeys placed in a Cumbria rumoured to have suffered a great poisoning from what would appear to be related to a nuclear disaster at Sellafield. In The Incomer (1987) Naomi is a wandering minstrel. She seems recently to have faced a crisis in her life, in which the claims of family in a past community have yielded to the claims of her art.