Project Aims
Scottish Female Authors of the Long Nineteenth-Century
While it is possible to find information about some of the writers featured here elsewhere on the internet, this site brings them together as a distinctive group for the first time. It focuses on writers who lived and worked between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century both because this is the era when women in Britain began to become professional authors and because this is where women writers’ absence from Scottish literary history is most marked.
This site is aimed at a general audience, but it may be particularly useful for people who enjoy nineteenth-century literature but may not know much about its Scottish dimensions, and for people who enjoy reading contemporary Scottish literature and would like to learn about its antecedents. If you like Jane Austen’s novels, you may enjoy Susan Ferrier’s! If you’re a fan of Thomas Hardy, try Violet Jacob! Those who enjoy reading Anthony Trollope or Wilkie Collins may like Margaret Oliphant.
Users can browse authors alphabetically, explore a particular genre of writing, or search by keyword. Each author entry includes a short biography and an overview of their writing. Where possible, it includes links to a couple of the author’s major works and to a few journal articles or books about them. If there are no links provided, either the author’s works are still under copyright and aren’t yet available online, or they are too rare or obscure to have been digitized.
acknowledgements and future developments
There are a couple of areas that are under-represented on this site: writing in Gaelic and writing by women of color. If you would like to contribute entries in either of these areas, please get in touch!
Women were central to Gaelic literary culture and played an active role in the protests of the Highland Land League towards the end of the nineteenth century. You can read about Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, one of the most prominent of these poets and activists, here.
Nineteenth-century Scots were involved in plantation slavery in the Caribbean, in the imperial government of India, and in the colonization of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Most of the women of color living in nineteenth-century Scotland would have ended up there through these colonial connections. However, few of them left any written traces, let alone published works. You can find out more about some of these women in this blog post “Where are the Black Women?” by Sarah Sheridan.