This chapter takes its impulse from what Germaine Greer has termed ‘the phenomenon of the transience of female literary fame’. Its aim is twofold: to make a start on the reclamation and re-presentation of women novelists writing in Scotland between 1920 and 1970, and in particular those of the inter-war period, and to demonstrate how these writers explored female experience, becoming makers of their own images in ways which frequently ran counter to the often stereotypical depiction of women and their roles in the Scottish male-authored fiction of the times. In the 1920s and ‘30s these women wrote alongside but outwith the predominantly male Scottish Renaissance movement, in a way which reflected the marginalisation of women in a society still strongly patriarchal, notwithstanding the recognition given to their war work and the expansion of the franchise to include women in 1918 and 1928. Nevertheless, despite the dominant ideology of the times, the optimism about prospects for change and advancement in the inter-war period is reflected in the significant amount of writing by women in the 1920s and ‘30s and by the feminist nature of much of this work. The new Scottish women writers honestly depict the subordinate roles allotted to women in personal and social life. But not content merely to mirror the status quo, they also challenge this situation, either explicitly or obliquely, and chart the attempts of their female protagonists to lead a different, personally determined life, often in the face of family or social disapproval.

Inevitably the choice of authors and texts for discussion has involved a degree of personal choice. The period span is a wide one and I am aware that there may be writers of interest whom I have overlooked or individual works which may deserve more attention than they receive here. I have selected texts which seem to me to offer an ideological awareness of the situation of women in their time together with a satisfying fictional form. Mary Cleland's The Sure Traveller and Dot Allan's Makeshift are therefore featured as opposed to less challenging novels by O. Douglas; and the fiction of Nancy Brysson Morrison rather than what seem to me the more theatrically conceived novels of her sister Peggy, who wrote under the name of March Cost.