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UCL Mellon Programme: Identities and Culture in Europe since 1945

Seminar: 7 December 2005

Aileen Christianson: Lost and Found, Gender and Genre: Scottish Women Writers (19th and 20th century)

Abstract

One of the main pursuits of my recent academic life has been the teaching of Scottish women novelists of the 1920s and 1930s who were published and then disappeared (just as happened everywhere else outwith Scotland). They were rediscovered in the 1980s with republication by Canongate Classics and may now re-disappear as their works go out of print again. My other pursuits (for much longer) have been the editing of the Duke-Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle and a tussling with critical approaches to the private life-writing of Welsh Carlyle. Both these pursuits have led to two different experiences in short biography: one of Willa Muir for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and one of Welsh Carlyle for the Carlyle Encyclopedia. I am also nearing completion of a monograph on Willa Muir. These are both writers for whom there is an abundance of biographical material. I will talk about these two (with almost too much material to draw on, as well as the problems of them often being known mainly in relation to their husbands, Edwin Muir, the poet, and Thomas Carlyle, the essayist and Victorian monolith) in the context of other women writers who are more disguised or mysterious through the lack of surviving biographical material: their texts stand almost on their own, while Muir's and Welsh Carlyle's are embedded in an abundance of riches, assumptions and prejudices. The other writers include Christian Watt, Ellen Johnston, Margaret Oliphant (19th century), and Nancy Brysson Morrison, Nan Shepherd and Lorna Moon (20th century). As well as discussing writers such as Christian Watt and Jane Welsh Carlyle in relation to gender and genre (what genres can their life writing be related to?), I will consider their relation (as unpublished writers) to the other (published) writers whose reputation comes and goes as they disappear and reappear from literary histories and national narratives.

This page last modified 8 February, 2012 by UCL Mellon Admin