This chapter examines Thomas Pringle’s and Susanna Strickland’s literary relationship and their contributions to anti-slavery print culture in the years surrounding their work on The History of Mary Prince. Each brought a different set of interests and strengths to the production of The History. Pringle was an established voice in abolitionist writing, having published anti-slavery poems and essays in venues ranging from the Oriental Herald to the Penny Magazine. Strickland had not previously written about slavery, but she was practiced in writing for the fashionable and ornamental publications that targeted one of the anti-slavery movement’s primary audiences, middle-class white women. In the years immediately surrounding the publication of Prince’s History, Pringle and Strickland brought anti-slavery discourse into ornamental and ostensibly apolitical forms of print culture such as literary annuals; conversely, by foregrounding the first-person testimony of enslaved people, they brought novelistic discourse into overtly political and polemical publications such as the Anti-Slavery Reporter.

This chapter explores the transformation of British responses to slavery during the 1830s through the writing of Frances Trollope. In this decade, Britons declared the abolition of colonial slavery as proof of their superior morals and impeccable manners. Trollope’s travel narrative Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1838) participated in the reconstruction of racism as a peculiarly American form of bad manners. Although Black women are virtually absent from Domestic Manners, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw is notable for its range of Black female characters and its frank exploration of the sexual exploitation to which enslaved women were subjected. Trollope’s belated acknowledgement of the gendered effects of enslavement reflects the sensational impact of the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831). Trollope reveals a historic kinship and complicity between Great Britain and the United States as slaveholding nations. The reception of Prince’s History among British abolitionists who did not want to acknowledge this complicity demonstrated how well-intentioned good manners could function as a form of racism.

The union of England’s and Scotland’s parliaments was not just a political and economic project but also a narrative and rhetorical one. As a dissenter, tradesman, and newspaper proprietor, Defoe was uniquely positioned to write Great Britain into existence. This chapter reveals that whether he was addressing Scottish or English readers, and whether he was writing pamphlets, poetry, or articles for his Review, Defoe’s message regarding the Act of Union was remarkably consistent. Employing a rhetoric of common sense, he repeatedly argued that it was illogical to pit Scottish against English interests in the negotiation of a treaty that would transform both into Britons and render their interests identical. This argument boldly asked readers to imagine that they were already British, or to proleptically inhabit an as yet unrealized identity.

CH 4: Flora Annie Steel and Violet Jacob participated in the late nineteenth-century romance revival that harkened back to the adventure stories pioneered by Walter Scott. The imperial romance’s focus on cultural conflict and conquest and its exotic settings were the antithesis of the everyday life that Steel’s and Jacob’s countrywomen tended to depict. However, Steel and Jacob did not simply imitate or borrow wholesale the generic conventions developed by Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson but instead challenged the imperial romance’s cult of manliness. Steel drew on the conventions of the New Woman novel to foreground women’s participation in the adventures of empire-building. She critiqued the masculine exclusivity of adventure fiction, but not the imperial ideologies it propagated. Jacob’s novels take male adventurers as their protagonists but turn the imperial romance’s focus on conflict and conquest inward in two senses, from Britain’s overseas empire to its Celtic peripheries, and from physical to psychological struggle. Set in Wales and Scotland, Jacob’s novels explore the borderlands where English policies and practices meet indigenous traditions, and where divided cultural allegiances lead to moral conflict.

CH 2: Over the course of her fifty-year career writing serial fiction, short stories, and opinion pieces for an array of periodicals, Annie S. Swan repeatedly attempted to reconcile her prolific literary output and her extensive public commitments with a middle-class ideal of domestic femininity. She carefully created distinct authorial personae for each of her major publication venues, shaping both her self-representation and her fiction to address the class and gender of each periodical’s target audience. A comparison of the personae that Swan constructed and the type of fiction she wrote for the People’s Friend, the Woman at Home, and The British Weekly demonstrates how these three periodicals approached the issue of women’s work beyond the home – an issue that was particularly fraught for Swan as celebrity author, wife, and mother. Her most successful role was as counselor and role model to the primarily working-class female readership of The People’s Friend, for whom her fiction served a compensatory function, providing a much-needed escape from their daily toil within and without the home.

Conclusion: Awareness of the romance of everyday life did not disappear from Scottish women’s writing with the advent of the First World War. A concern with magnificence of the mundane continues to illuminate a range of mid-century fiction, from D. E. Stevenson’s popular romances to Muriel Spark’s postmodern novels. The persistence of Scottish women writers’ interest in the romance of everyday life has been met with a similarly persistent devaluation of their work on the grounds of its supposed triviality. In the place of depth, originality, and complexity, Scottish women writers offer comfort, fortification, and pleasure – affective qualities that scholars and critics have largely forgotten about. They suggest that awareness of the beauty and wonder of everyday life is an important skill to cultivate because it is not an instrumental or goal-oriented practice: the experience is its own end.

Introduction: Walter Scott’s tales of chivalry and adventure inaugurated a masculinized Scottish romance tradition that celebrated a sublime and heroic version of Scotland. Nineteenth-century Scotswomen responded to Scott’s influence by establishing a countertradition of unromantic or even antiromantic representations of Scotland. Their novels challenge the long-standing claim that Scotland lacked any equivalent to the English realist novel. In turning from the past to the present and from the sublimity of Scott’s Highland landscapes to farmhouses, factories, and suburban villas, Scottish women writers brought romance to everyday life, illuminating the magnificence of the mundane. Drawing on the evangelical discourses emerging from the splintering of the Presbyterian Church in 1843, they represented fiction as a form of spiritual comfort, an antidote to the dreary monotony and petty frustrations of daily existence.

CH 3: The New Woman, a figure that emerged in the fin-de-siècle novel, was a decidedly metropolitan phenomenon. Yet novels by sisters Mary and Jane Findlater and their better-known contemporary Mona Caird explored the possibility of a Scottish New Woman, recognizing the peculiar impediments to economic and intellectual independence faced by women in rural Scotland. Employing aesthetic techniques that foregrounded their own artistry, including impressionistic reveries, abrupt shifts in perspective, and elaborate symbolism, Caird and the Findlaters suggested that the capacity to appreciate and create beauty is the defining characteristic of Scotland’s New Woman. Caird represents the Scottish landscape as a source of inspiration for her musical protagonist but condemns the conformity demanded by Scottish society as antithetical to the development of her considerable genius. By contrast, the Findlaters suggest that women’s artistic development is possible within the limitations imposed by Scottish society, albeit on the small scale that they employ in their own novels.

CH 5: The novels of O. Douglas (Anna Buchan) have been overlooked by scholars because of their apparent artlessness and simplicity. By contrast, those of her contemporary Catherine Carswell are celebrated as examples of Scottish literary modernism. Yet Douglas’s and Carswell’s novels are not in fact as different as their disparate reception might lead us to expect. They challenge Free Church ambivalence toward the indulgence of aesthetic pleasure by representing everyday beauty as a source of happiness and of moral and intellectual amelioration. When Douglas’s characters learn to appreciate and create instances of everyday beauty, they become reconciled to the ordinariness of middle-class, evangelical Scottish society, which they realize is not so ordinary after all. In Carswell’s novels, the appreciation of everyday beauty becomes the modernist epiphany, a moment in which the everyday is transformed and the confines of middle-class, evangelical Scottish society are left behind. Reading Carswell’s novels together with Douglas’s suggests that it is perhaps more useful to conceive of the middlebrow and modernism, or popular literature and high art, as a continuum than as an opposition.

CH 1: Margaret Oliphant, one of the first Scotswomen to make a living as a professional writer, looked to Walter Scott to legitimate her pragmatic understandings of authorship as a skilled trade and literature as a form of entertainment rather than a source of spiritual truths. In her autobiography and her novels, Oliphant drew on Scott’s example to explore the inverse relationship between literature’s aesthetic and economic value. Both her sentimental Scottish romances and her masterfully ironic Chronicles of Carlingford declare the superiority of skilled craftmanship to inspired genius as source of literary and artistic production. The Chronicles of Carlingford became a touchstone for later Scottish women writers by articulating an aesthetics of the ordinary and affirming the vast importance that seemingly mundane events occupy in the lives of most people. But it was in her romances that Oliphant defined her own relationship to Scottish literary tradition by feminizing the chivalric adventures of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels.