Willa Muir
Willa Muir was born Wilhelmina Johnston Anderson on 13 March 1890 in Montrose. She was the eldest of four children to Shetlandic parents, Peter and Elizabeth. In 1899, Peter and newborn Elizabeth died of tuberculosis and following this, Willa wrote her first known piece of fiction, ‘The Cheesedish’.
Thereafter, Willa was enrolled in the public school where she played the children’s singing games explored in the opening chapter of Living with Ballads (1965). She later won a bursary to Montrose Academy, where she ‘found no singing games’ (Living with Ballads, 14). It is for this reason that she believes she ‘was lucky to have learned them when [she] did’ (Living with Ballads, 14).
Willa attended St Andrews University in 1907, graduating with honours in Greek and the Humanities, and completed a postgraduate degree in English Language and Literature and Modern History. During this time, she contributed to College Echoes as a writer and an editor. After graduating, Willa taught in England and, during the Great War, worked as an assistant lecturer in Latin at St Andrews University. She studied Child Psychology in 1916 at Bedford College, but her thesis remained unfinished when she left in 1918.
That year, Willa met Edwin Muir in Glasgow. Their engagement in 1919 ended her position as vice principal at the Gypsy Hill Teacher Training College. After two years of marriage in London, the Muirs began travelling Europe, living, at various times, in England, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Austria, France, Scotland and the Orkneys, and America. Their son Gavin was born in 1927.
Willa and Edwin supported themselves with teaching positions, translating, and writing. While Edwin regularly receives as much credit for their translations (and in earlier decades, sometimes the sole credit), it is now known that Willa often completed the larger portion of the translations to support the family, particularly in later years when Edwin focused on his poetry. The Muirs are most well-known for their translations of Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers trilogy, and for bringing Franz Kafka’s books into the English language.
Willa published two novels, two book-length feminist essays, a memoir, and a book on ballads, as well as a wide range of radio broadcasts, articles, and essays and two privately published, small-run releases. Her unpublished novels, ‘Mrs Muttoe and the Top Storey’ and ‘The Usurpers’, can be found alongside her papers, letters, diaries, and the journal of Gavin’s early years in St Andrews University archive.
Willa’s writing is characterised by Modernist narrative techniques, symbolism, and psychoanalysis, which she used to explore gender in early twentieth century Scotland. Her published novels Imagined Corners (1931) and Mrs Ritchie (1933) are set in prewar Calderwick, which is based on Montrose. Women: An Inquiry (1925) is seen as the first feminist theory text to come out of Scotland.
Her writings show her own tormented relationship with religion, critiquing Calvinist Scotland’s oppressive standards for women. Mrs Ritchie, in particular, is a rich, modernist depiction of the monstrous effects of Calvinist doctrine and the consequences of gendered oppression on girls.
Contributed by Emily L. Pickard.
Bibliography
P.H. Butter, ‘Willa Muir: Writer’ in Edwin Muir Centenary Assessments, eds. C.J.M. Shields and D.S. Robb (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1990), 58-74.
Aileen Christiansen, “Willa Muir, Modernism and Gender,” Scottish and International Modernisms: Relationships and Configurations. Ed. Emma Dymock and Margery Palmer McCulloch (Glasgow: ASLS, 2011), 132-147.
Aileen Christiansen, Moving in Circles: Willa Muir's Writings (Edinburgh: Word Power Books, 2007).
Margaret Elphinstone, “Willa Muir: Crossing the Genres,” A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, Ed. Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 400-415.
Joy Hendry (ed.), Chapman: Peerie Willa Muir, no. 71 (1993).
William W.J. Knox, ‘Willa Muir: Living with Genius (2)’ in The Lives of Scottish Women: Women and Scottish Society 1800-1980 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Ltd., 2006), 182-202.
Margery Palmer McCulloch, “Interwar Literature,” The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing, Ed. Glenda Norquay (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 103-112.
selected works
Women: An Inquiry (1925)
5 Songs of the Auvergnat done into Modern Scots (1931)
Imagined Corners (1931)
Mrs Ritchie (1933)
Mrs Grundy in Scotland (1936)
Women in Scotland (1936)
‘Mrs Muttoe and the Top Storey’ (1938-1940) – unpublished
‘The Usurpers’ (1951-52) – unpublished
Living with Ballads (1965)
Belonging (1968)
Laconics, Jingles, and Other Verses (1969) – 200 copies privately published