Early nineteenth-century Edinburgh had a lot less time for James Hogg than for “the Ettrick Shepherd,” the literary persona created partly by Hogg himself, partly by the tight circle that ran Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Comic, bibulous, full of naïve folk-wisdom, easy to patronize, the Ettrick Shepherd was invented as a souvenir of the pastoral lowlands, a survival whose presence among one of the Edinburgh literary élites could represent both the continuity of modern Scots culture and the impolite past it had left behind. The Ettrick Shepherd, though perhaps more pliable, certainly more reassuringly conservative than Burns had been, could not always be relied upon to play this part, and had occasionally to be reminded of his place by editors, reviewers, even by himself. But he was much more comfortable to be with than James Hogg, the author of obsessive, experimental fictions which either satirized or ignored the decencies of polite letters. To some degree even these could be bowdlerized and domesticated, as many of them were in the Victorian collections of Hogg's fiction published after his death, and passed off as written “by the Ettrick Shepherd.” But one in particular, and for my money the best of them – The Three Perils of Woman – was immediately recognized as irredeemable by its first reviewers, and until 1995 had never been reprinted.

The Three Perils of Woman was published in 1823, a year before The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.