Scottish Short Fiction

Introduction

Scotland has a long, proud history and a strong culture. After centuries of existence as an independent nation under a Scottish monarchy, Scotland’s throne joined England’s in 1603 with the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne on the death of the childless Elizabeth I. In addition, partially as a result of the financial catastrophe of the Darien disaster (which occurred when Scotland failed in its attempt to create a colony in Central America), the Scottish and English parliaments joined in 1707, creating Great Britain, ruled by a British parliament in London.

Despite this, Scotland has retained its own culture and languages to the present day. In 1979, however, the Scottish people defeated a ballot measure that would have allowed Scotland to separate its parliament from England’s in a movement called “devolution.” The years of Margaret Thatcher, prime minister from 1979 to 1990, were particularly difficult for the Scots and led to a renewed push toward devolution, spearheaded in part by both the Labour and Scottish Nationalist Parties. In 1997, the Scots once again voted on the issue of devolution, and this time the measure passed. In 1999, for the first time since 1707, Scotland’s parliament sat in Edinburgh. Under the leadership of the Scottish Nationalist Party, the new Scottish Parliament building was opened in 2007. It is unsurprising that Scottish literature has, historically and into the modern day, often addressed issues of identity, politics, and nationhood.

In addition, Scottish short-fiction writers often reveal a deeply felt connection to the land, using rural Scottish settings, although many of the writers themselves have immigrated to other countries. In later works, the connection to the land reveals itself in ecological consciousness, often in stark contrast to another important strain of Scottish short fiction set in bleak and industrialized urban settings.

A Storytelling, Multilingual Society

Storytelling in Scotland has its roots in ancient folktales and ballads in both Gaelic and Scots. Ballads such as “Sir Patrick Spens” (1765) and “The Twa Corbies” (1812) share narrative structures and thematic concerns with many later Scottish works of short fiction. It is likely that the Scottish fascination with the supernatural finds its roots in traditional stories. In addition, Scottish ballads and traditional stories often contain a strong element of dramatic irony, another stylistic feature continued by later writers.

Scotland’s status as a multilingual culture also underpins many of the stylistic features of its short fiction. Gaelic is a Celtic language spoken primarily in the western highlands and islands. While there are roughly only sixty thousand native Gaelic speakers, Gaelic has been a vibrant literary language since the beginning of Scotland’s history.

Likewise, Scots, the language of the lowlands and the northern isles, flourishes in written and oral language. Scots is not a dialect of English; although Scots and English share a common ancestor, Scots evolved into its own language during the early Middle Ages. The educational system repressed both Scots and Gaelic after the Union of the Parliaments. Thus, writers who have chosen to write in these languages have made both stylistic and political choices.

Scottish English is yet another language spoken and written by speakers and writers. A dialect of English, Scottish English retains some of the vocabulary and usages of Scots. Standard English is also commonly used in both writing and speaking throughout Scotland.

The Eighteenth Century

Although Scotland is a small country, during the eighteenth century, the nation produced some of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, including David Hume, Adam Smith, and James Clerk Maxwell. Likewise, the literary milieu offered encouragement and an outlet for philosophical treatises, poetry, and short fiction. Magazines, journals, and literary societies flourished in the coffeehouses of Edinburgh. Journals such as the Edinburgh Review, Edinburgh Gazette, and Blackwood’s, as well as writers such as Robert Burns and Walter Scott, directed attention toward traditional Scottish ballads and tales and to Scottish themes and contexts. Moreover, these journals and others allowed Scottish writers to explore the short-fiction genre in depth. Indeed, much of the development of the modern short story in English can be traced directly back to Edinburgh in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, and John Galt

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is Scotland’s best-known prose writer. As a novelist, he enjoyed international fame, and his novels continue to be included in lists of classic literature in English. Known as a historical novelist, Scott also wrote several popular and well-crafted short stories. Following his wife’s death in 1826, a grief-stricken Scott penned the stories that would be published as Chronicles of the Canongate (1827). The book comprises two short stories, “The Drovers” and “The Highland Widow,” and the novella “The Surgeon’s Daughter.” In these stories, Scott thematically addresses the loss of nationhood and the immigration of Scottish people to far-flung outposts of the empire. Scott juxtaposes honor and disgrace with a keen sense of irony; for example, in “The Highland Widow,” a woman drugs her son so that he will not be forced into the English army and sent to fight foreign wars. The English, however, execute him as a deserter.

A contemporary of Scott, James Hogg (1770-1835), although not so well known to general audiences, was a key figure in the development of modern short fiction. Hogg, who worked as a poor farm servant before coming to Edinburgh in 1810, drew on folktales and ballads, as well as on the Calvinism of rural Scotland, as sources for many of his stories. Hogg had a talent for writing in many voices, and his satires and parodies were particularly effective. Although he was largely overlooked during his lifetime, Hogg is enjoying a resurgence in critical attention in the twenty-first century.

A third writer spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was John Galt (1779-1839). Although most of his major works were novels, he also produced many short fictions in the form of travel letters and stories examining the shift to industrialization in small rural Scottish towns and villages. Like many Scots, Galt immigrated to Canada, and his work became popular in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Margaret Oliphant, and Sir James Barrie

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Edinburgh and received a strict Calvinist upbringing. Much to his parents’ dismay, he married an older American woman and immigrated with her to California. He read American writers widely, particularly the poet Walt Whitman and the philosopher and essayist Henry David Thoreau. In addition to several short stories, Stevenson’s best-known short fictional work is the novella “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886). The story draws on the Scottish interest in the supernatural and a psychological fascination with the split personality. Indeed, several critics note the influence of Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) on Stevenson, who uses the device of the doppelgänger, or dark double, as the key plot element.

A contemporary of Stevenson, Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897) also drew on supernatural tales in her short stories. She found herself without financial resources and with a large family, including her brother and his family, to support on the death of her husband; she turned to writing to support them all. Between 1852 and her death, she wrote more than 120 separate works, including novels, essays, and collections of short stories. “The Library Window” (1896) features a young female protagonist who, looking through a window, sees a scholar working there. The tale is a ghost story, told with nuance and detail, and represents Oliphant’s best work. Although immensely popular in her own day, her work was largely overlooked throughout the twentieth century.

On the other hand, Sir James Barrie (1860-1937) admired Oliphant’s work. Although best known for his play Peter Pan (1904), Barrie also wrote a series of short stories set in the Scottish village of Thrums, a fictional rendering of his hometown of Kirriemuir. The stories feature village eccentrics and inhabitants who speak Scots, though they are written in English. Based on these stories, Barrie was associated with a group of similarly inclined writers called the Kailyard School.

The Kailyard writers were dismayed by the ugliness and coarseness of modern urban life. They saw the increasing industrialization of Scotland as an unsuitable subject for fiction. In response, they wrote about small towns in Scotland. While some of Barrie’s stories are charming, the Kailyard writers have been viewed as overly sentimental. At the same time, however, their version of “Scottishness” was widely popular in Scotland, England, and abroad.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, and Scottish Detective Fiction

Readers are sometimes bemused to discover that the most English of all English detectives, Sherlock Holmes, was the creation of a Scottish writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). Doyle’s stories, however, demonstrate the intersection of the rational mind with uncanny occurrences. Between 1887 and 1927, Doyle wrote four novels and five volumes of short stories featuring Holmes. While Doyle was surely influenced by Poe’s stories, such as “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), featuring investigator Auguste Dupin, Doyle became the expert of the detective story. The investigatory conventions established by Doyle and features of both Hogg’s and Stevenson’s have influenced generations of crime writers, including Ian Rankin (b. 1960).

Suspense also figures in the stories by John Buchan (1875-1940), the urbane Scottish diplomat and writer who spent the last five years of his life as the governor general of Canada. Best known for his novel The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), Buchan also wrote various short stories. Like Stevenson, Buchan sets some of his short adventure fiction in exotic locales; like Barrie, he sets other stories in the small villages of the Cheviot Hills. In “The Loathly Opposite” (1927), Buchan draws on the doppelgänger tradition in a story of a British code breaker and his German opposite. Moreover, like many short Scottish fictions, the story depends on dramatic irony for its conclusion.

The Early Twentieth Century and the Scottish Renaissance

The horrors of World War I and the advent of modernism were also important influences on Scottish literature. The postwar writers reacted strongly against the sentimental nature of the Kailyard school; rather than looking back nostalgically at an imagined, provincial Scottish past, they instead looked forward to a rebirth of Scottish culture and nation. Poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) was the main architect of the Scottish literary renaissance, but writers and artists in all genres, including short fiction, contributed to the debate over Scottish national identity.

A key prose writer of the Scottish Renaissance was Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell (1901-1935). Earlier writers struggled with the tension between using English and Scots, often using an English narrative voice while employing Scots for the dialogue. Robert Crawford, writing in Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature (2009), points out that this arrangement served to put the English-speaking narrative voice in a position of superiority to the Scots-speaking characters. In short stories such as “Smeddun” and in his novels, Gibbon solved this problem by not using dialogue. Instead, he returned to the Scottish oral storytelling traditions; the voice that tells the story is not the omniscient English narrative voice but a Scottish storyteller's voice, using Scottish English vocabulary and syntax. His writing is thus Scottish in tone but devoid of the sentimentalism of the Kailyard school. Other influential short fiction writers during the period include Neil Gunn, Erik Linklater, and Lorna Moon.

Scottish Short Fiction After World War II

Born at the close of World War I in Edinburgh, Muriel Spark (1918-2006) was not only one of Scotland’s finest novelists but also a writer of extraordinary short stories. Like so many other Scottish novelists and short-story writers, Spark spent much of her life living away from Scotland in places such as Italy, Africa, and the United States. Like the American short-story writer Flannery O’Connor, Spark demonstrated in her work an interest in the bizarre and grotesque, as well as the influence of Roman Catholicism. With their strange and unworldly incidents, Spark’s short stories often presage Magical Realism in style. At the same time, her fascination with the unlikely and the magical also reaches back to the foundations of Scottish literature and tales.

Iain Crichton Smith (1928-1998) was a bilingual (Scottish Gaelic and English) poet and writer from the Outer Hebrides. He was prolific in both languages, and his work stands as an argument for the importance of Indigenous language and voice. His short stories often examine issues of isolation, separation, and identity. In addition, his work is largely anti-authoritarian.

Other important writers of short fiction in the post-World War II period include Naomi Mitchison, Elspeth Davie, and George Mackay Brown.

The Scottish Revival

In the early 1970s, Professor Philip Hobsbaum (1932-2005) of Glasgow University held a series of writing workshops in that city that proved an important landmark in Scottish fiction. Members of the group writing prose included Alasdair Gray (b. 1934), James Kelman (b. 1946), and Agnes Owens (b. 1926). They formed the nucleus of a vibrant literary revival in the urban centers of Scotland. In addition, writers such as Shena Mackay (b. 1944) also contributed significant work to the period.

Gray combines the realistic with the fantastic in his short stories, most notably in his fine collection Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), a volume that includes stories from the 1950s through the 1980s. His work connects to the traditions of Scottish literature in its irony and humor, as well as its often mythic quality. At the same time, his work is strongly contemporary in its displacement of time and the multilayering of storylines. He has continued to examine Scottish independence as an important theme.

Kelman is a strong voice for Scottish culture and language, refusing to bend to so-called “proper” English conventions. His narrators and characters speak in the same Glaswegian tongue. Most of his characters are working-class people, often adrift. A radical writer in every sense of the word, he insists that the stories of the disenfranchised are important and worthy of respect. In 1985, Gray, Kelman, and Owens jointly published Lean Tales.

The Contemporary Scottish Short Story

Writers such as A. L. Kennedy (b. 1965), Ali Smith (b. 1962), Jackie Kay (b. 1961), Irvine Welsh (b. 1958), and Janice Galloway (b. 1956), among many others, write with assurance and maturity about contemporary issues in Scotland. At times, these writers address the brutal reality of urban life, as in Welsh’s groundbreaking collection of linked stories (also viewed as an episodic novel), Trainspotting (1993). Kennedy’s critically acclaimed short fiction takes as its subject the lives of ordinary people, who often find themselves abused and marginalized. Smith weaves stories within stories, looking back to the early Scottish tales in both structure and fascination with oddness and the supernatural while retaining contemporary subject matter.

Additional authors of Scottish short fiction that have achieved popularity in the twenty-first century include Jane Alexander, Laura Hird, A.L. Kennedy, Jenni Fagan, and Ali Smith. Scottish short fiction, distinctive in voice, subject matter, setting, and theme, continues to grow in stature and quality. Contemporary writers find their roots in their country’s culture and history while innovatively pushing the boundaries, expanding the genre's potential.

Bibliography

Brown, Ian, et al., editors. The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature: Modern Transformations: New Identities (from 1918). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. 

Carruthers, Gerard. Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Crawford, Robert. Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Dunn, Douglas. The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Schoene-Harwood, Berthold, editor. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

“Scottish Short Story Collections.” Scottish Book Trust, www.scottishbooktrust.com/book-lists/short-stories. Accessed 31 July 2024.