Geographies of Self: Scottish Women Writing Scotland

Abstract

Characterized by its delineation of home territory through attention to localized setting, Scottish women’s writing in the period from 1880 to 1920 appears to combine commercialism and conservatism. Inspired by Margaret Oliphant’s (1828–1897) example, writers such as Mary (1865–1963) and Jane Findlater (1866–1946) and Annie S. Swan (1859–1943) established wide popularity and, in Swan’s case particularly, considerable financial success through novels that contributed to the period’s flourishing of regional fiction. These writers deployed predominantly rural Scottish settings, often with a retrospective gaze, to explore the boundaries of women’s lives in a period in which relationships to ‘home’ were being reconfigured by a wider political questioning of domesticity and the expansion of a Scottish diaspora. Bringing together novelists rarely read in conjunction and, too often, given cursory attention in literary histories, this chapter considers the interstices of place, self, and print culture in fiction by women who addressed changing constituencies of interest and market.