Scott's early fiction incorporates within it an exploration of the ways in which the novel form may be deployed to offer narratives of both national and personal identity. However, while these early novels by the Author of Waverley may exhibit an anxiety concerning what can be communicated via the discourse (or discourses) from which the novel is constituted his seventh novel, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, manifests an increasingly fraught relationship to the specific linguistic materials upon which narrative discourse rests, demonstrating an acute anxiety concerning the limits of language's referential potentialities.

The Heart of Mid-Lothian is ostensibly less concerned with the recovery of the past, whether national or personal, than Scott's earlier fiction. It deals with no major historical event and if we follow its carefully controlled time scheme its protagonist Jeanie Deans is already at least thirty-three by the time the main action begins. ‘Approaching to what is called in females the middle age’ (p. 84) she shows, as Jane Millgate notes, none of the tendencies towards waywardness, fancy and rebellion attributed to Scott's more youthful (frequently male) heroes. Certainly, The Heart of Mid-Lothian can barely be called a historical novel in the conventional sense and it does not follow the template set out by Scott in Waverley or followed in later works such as The Tale of Old Mortality, Rob Roy or Redgauntlet where the protagonist is caught up in a major historical moment and required to align himself with the political events that shape the force of history.