Though we know that the nineteenth century in Scottish fiction has until recently been a neglected period, ‘neglected’ hardly seems a strong enough term to apply to the women writers of that time. Some advance has certainly been made. Susan Ferrier, Mary Brunton, Margaret Oliphant and the Findlater sisters, for instance, are now well enough known, and other chapters in this volume testify to the attention which their work is beginning to receive.

But they are the tip of an iceberg. A comprehensive directory or index covering Scottish writing of the period will yield the names of literally scores of nineteenth-century women novelists,1 and to many researchers they are likely to be nothing but names. Amelia Edith Barr, who began novel-writing at the age of fifty and published forty-seven novels in the next thirty ‘five years? Grace Kennedy, a retiring lady who published all her ‘religious tales’ anonymously? Mary Cross, described by an admittedly enthusiastic critic as ‘someone whose name must be familiar … to readers of current Scottish fiction’? Sarah Macnaughtan? Felicia Skene? Who are these women? Ought we to know?

Because they have been so largely forgotten, this of course is the problem: are they forgotten because they deserve to be? They may have been the merest scribblers making pin-money from casual and ill-considered romantic tales. (Though if this was so, their lists of editions and translations indicate that they fooled a lot of the people a lot of the time; a consideration of popular taste of the day might want to ask how this was done.) Much more study is needed to establish the value of their work and their place in the canon of Scottish writing.

The present chapter makes a tentative beginning on such a study. The writers I consider here may perhaps stand as representatives of the group. Their lives span the whole of the nineteenth century, extending in fact well into the twentieth; Flora Annie Steel in her ripe old age could have read Catherine Carswell's Open the Door! (and would have enjoyed it, we may hazard a guess, after learning about the robust exploits of Mrs Steel). Among them, too, they spanned the genres. They wrote historical, romantic and religious fiction, children's books, non-fiction, and a great deal of journalism.