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12 - Rediscovering Scottish Women’s Fiction in the Nineteenth Century
- Edited by Douglas Gifford, University of Glasgow, Dorothy McMillan, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- A History of Scottish Women's Writing
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 24 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 03 February 2020, pp 196-207
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Summary
Though we know that the nineteenth century in Scottish fiction has until recently been a neglected period, ‘neglected’ hardly seems a strong enough term to apply to the women writers of that time. Some advance has certainly been made. Susan Ferrier, Mary Brunton, Margaret Oliphant and the Findlater sisters, for instance, are now well enough known, and other chapters in this volume testify to the attention which their work is beginning to receive.
But they are the tip of an iceberg. A comprehensive directory or index covering Scottish writing of the period will yield the names of literally scores of nineteenth-century women novelists,1 and to many researchers they are likely to be nothing but names. Amelia Edith Barr, who began novel-writing at the age of fifty and published forty-seven novels in the next thirty ‘five years? Grace Kennedy, a retiring lady who published all her ‘religious tales’ anonymously? Mary Cross, described by an admittedly enthusiastic critic as ‘someone whose name must be familiar … to readers of current Scottish fiction’? Sarah Macnaughtan? Felicia Skene? Who are these women? Ought we to know?
Because they have been so largely forgotten, this of course is the problem: are they forgotten because they deserve to be? They may have been the merest scribblers making pin-money from casual and ill-considered romantic tales. (Though if this was so, their lists of editions and translations indicate that they fooled a lot of the people a lot of the time; a consideration of popular taste of the day might want to ask how this was done.) Much more study is needed to establish the value of their work and their place in the canon of Scottish writing.
The present chapter makes a tentative beginning on such a study. The writers I consider here may perhaps stand as representatives of the group. Their lives span the whole of the nineteenth century, extending in fact well into the twentieth; Flora Annie Steel in her ripe old age could have read Catherine Carswell's Open the Door! (and would have enjoyed it, we may hazard a guess, after learning about the robust exploits of Mrs Steel). Among them, too, they spanned the genres. They wrote historical, romantic and religious fiction, children's books, non-fiction, and a great deal of journalism.
31 - The Modem Historical Tradition
- Edited by Douglas Gifford, University of Glasgow, Dorothy McMillan, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- A History of Scottish Women's Writing
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 24 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 03 February 2020, pp 456-467
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Summary
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Scottish historical novels and women novelists go together. The axiom calls for closer examination, and not only because, like most such truths, it is at best half-true. We can easily list many male novelists who, at least sometimes, write historical novels (Neil Gunn, Nigel Tranter, George Mackay Brown, even Iain Crichton Smith) and, of course, many women novelists deal with contemporary concerns. More insidiously, however, the belief seems to come with a corollary: when considering contemporary Scottish literature, historical novels can safely be ignored. It is time to look at Scottish women historical novelists with a clear eye.
If mentioned at all in surveys of Scottish fiction, the historical genre is usually dismissed in a line or two. Alan Bold devotes a chapter in his Modem Scottish Literature to ‘Women and history: Plaidy, Mitchison, Dunnett’. He accepts (following Anthony Burgess) ‘the pre-eminence of women in historical fiction’, and comments that ‘In Scotland, historical fiction tends to be produced with an energy that would overwhelm an industry’.
A few years earlier Francis Russell Hart in The Scottish Novel similarly titles a chapter ‘Mitchison and later romancers’, remarking:
There have been few signs … that Scotland has lost its unique position as the stereotypical land of popular romance … But the garish covers often hide thoroughly researched fiction’ alized histories and biographies. They are almost all by women, most of them non'Scots … It is too easy to pass off the phenomenon as merely exploitative or fraudulent; in fact, the talents are formidable and prolific and deserve far more than the glance accorded them here.
Hart and Bold agree, then, that most twentieth'century Scottish torical novels are written by women (though both acknowledge the considerable pre? ace of Nigel Tranter in this otherwise female field). We should note, however, that both - Hart more consciously perhaps than Bold - include in their survey writers who were not Scottish, either by birth or, in Muriel Spark's term, formation. Jean Plaidy was bom in London, as was another popular if perhaps more serious chronicler, Margaret Irwin. Jane Lane and D. K. Broster, mentioned by Hart, were bom respectively in Ruislip and Liverpool. All spent their long and prolific writing lives mainly, if not exclusively, in England. Ever since Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs (1810) Scottish history has been attractive to nonScottish historical novelists.