When
students study literature – it is the literature of men that is studied. Many wonder – where are the women writers? 18th
century Scottish culture was transitional and interactive with regard to both
oral and written literature.
**Poet Jenny Little
Little was
born in 1759, the same year as Burns. She was also a servant to Mrs Dunlop, Burn’s
patron. She was the daughter of a farm worker and as a servant to a local clergyman, she had received
a good education. She developed a love of
reading and became a local poet. She
wrote in both Scots and English as Burns did too. She even wrote an ‘Epistle to Mr Burns. ‘
Because of
their class both Burns and Little struggled to be taken seriously. Burns was
the ‘Heaven taught ploughman’ and Little was the ‘Scotch Milkmaid’ poet.
She came out with a Poetry Collection in 1792. She is studied in North American universities
as significant in the study of 18th century studies, while she is
mostly untaught in Scotland. She wrote
of gender, class and nation.
**Lady Anne Bernard
She was from
a noble family of Fife Scotland, born 1750 and wrote the well known ballad ‘Auld
Robin Gray’. She lived in Georgian society during the Scottish enlightenment.
To reward the nobility of Edinburgh a grand new town was built.
The Scottish
aristocracy sold out. Her family were the Lindsay’s of Balcarres and these
families carried the Union flag around the globe and helped to shape Britain’s
empire. Her father said, “You were born after the Union, Scotland is no more and
never likely to revive.”
Was it so
great though? Of her 8 brothers, 4 entered the army and 2 went to sea and one
joined the East India co. Three died in different corners of the world and a fourth
spent years in a Mysore dungeon. Eventually Bernard moved to London, married at
42 and went to live in the Cape of Good Hope.
**Willa Ewina Muir
Willa was
a writer and poet, born 1890 – 1970. She and her husband Edwin Muir were part
of the Montrose Scottish Renaissance between the great Wars. The
Muirs were part of the “restless intellectual group of writers and thinkers” in
1920-30s active during the Renaissance of Montrose along with the poet Hugh
MacDiarmid.
Born Wilhemina Anderson in Montrose of Shetlandic
parents (unlike her husband Edwin who did not attend secondary or higher
education) Willa earned a 1st class degree in Classics from University of St
Andrews in 1910. She taught languages before marrying Edwin 1919. For 40 years
the couple travelled and worked in Europe before their five years at Newbattle,
and went from there to Edwin’s post as Norton Professor of Literature at
Harvard University in the United States.
Much of her work explores feminism, gender & the
position of women of 1920-30s and is said to contain “perceptive comments of
the patriarchal world she existed in”. There has been a recent re-evaluation of
her published and unpublished work, including Aileen Christianson’s 2007 Moving
in Circles: Willa Muir’s Writings. 1996 Imagined Selves: Willa Muir and many
translations with her husband and under the pseudonym ‘Agnes Neill Scott’
Her publications include: Women: An Inquiry, Imagined
Corners, Mrs Ritchie, Mrs Grundy in Scotland, Living with Ballads, Belonging
