On Monday, 17 November 1862, with the backing of several St Andrews professors, aspiring medical student Elizabeth Garrett challenged the male domain of Scottish uni- versity education by walking towards a lecture theatre in St Andrews University to attend the eleven o’clock chemistry lecture. Her path was blocked by Susan Ferrier's nephew, Professor James Frederick Ferrier, the philosopher who invented the word ‘epistemology’, who stood in the doorway and asked Miss Garrett to turn back. She did.

This is in several ways an emblematic moment. It carries a secret dark irony since, about a decade before he blocked Miss Garrett's way, Ferrier had tried to learn something of chemistry when he realised that he had caught syphilis, probably from a London prostitute. On a more public level, it is an incident that brings together considerations of epistemology and gender, suggesting subtle and less subtle ways in which knowledge might be gendered. Miss Garrett could be seen as the victim of a masculinist epistemology underlying the university system. One suspects that the act of carnal knowledge which destroyed Ferrier might make him all the more keen to deny the respectable Miss Garrett access to the intellectual and practical knowledge of chemistry. For Ferrier, the apparently respectable family man, both private and institutional knowledge were to be guarded for fear of scandal. The presence of Miss Garrett was an epistemological challenge and he acted to control what she knew. By the standards of the age, not least in Scotland, it could be argued that it was unladylike of Miss Garrett to wish to attend the chemistry lectures, and that Professor Ferrier and the others who opposed her did so out of punctilious regard. Oppressive regard, we might argue nowadays. Such oppressive regard has often been crucial in the development of male attitudes to women in Scotland and has frequently conditioned women's behaviour. This chapter examines in the context of Scottish literature several instances of oppressive regard which seem to me suggestive and useful to ponder in the context of the history of Scottish women's writing. It focuses on oppressive regard as figured in literary brother-sister relationships, and it argues that, however tempting the search might be, the articulation of the history of Scottish women's writing must be something more than the simple search for emblematic precursors of modem feminism. No human being, no writer, is simply an emblem.