About
Scottish Women Writers on the Web
Scottish Women Writers on the Web is a project that aims to create a new resource for Scottish female authors of the long nineteenth century. This site is maintained by me, Juliet Shields. I am a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, where I teach classes on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British (and sometimes American) literature. I’m especially interested in the history of the novel, women writers, and Scottish literature.
My curiosity about nineteenth-century Scottish women writers began when I noticed their absence. While I knew of literally hundreds of nineteenth-century English and American women writers, I could only come up with a handful of Scotswomen. At first, I assumed there just weren’t very many—that conditions in Scotland were somehow more inhospitable to women authors than in England or the US.
But once I started digging around in libraries, I found that there were quite a lot of women writers in nineteenth-century Scotland, too. However, their books are no longer in print and their names have been lost to literary history. This site aims to change that.