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Introduction

If I were to say that Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners deals with the confining moral conventions of a small town in Scotland you might well expect another House with the Green Shutters. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The House with the Green Shutters was written in bitter reaction to the sentimentality of the kailyard school, and its attitude is blacker than that of the blackest Calvinist. The effect of this extravagance is to turn the book into melodrama with a plot as unreal as that of The Lilac Sunbonnet. There is neither melodrama nor sentimentality in Willa Muir. Indeed, the particular value of Imagined Corners is the mature balance she achieves between light and dark.

She was a woman who combined intellectual clarity with emotional vigour to a formidable degree. A friend of the Muirs confessed, ‘I was fond of Edwin, but Willa frightened me a bit,’ adding, ‘though when she got older she was very warm and grandmotherly.’ Other witnesses describe her variously as gay, caustic, brave, forthright, intellectual and ‘fun to be with’. The quality of her mind is quickly shown in this fresh, sprightly account of Edwin written for their American publisher (quoted by P.H. Butter in Edwin Muir: Man and Poet):

Has an enormous forehead, like a sperm whale’s: a fastidious, fleering and critical nose: an impish and sensuous mouth, a detached, aloof, cold eye. Witty when at his ease: elegant when he can afford it: sensitive and considerate: horribly shy and silent before strangers, and positively scared by social functions. Among friends, however, becomes completely daft, and dances Scottish reels with fervour.

That is the work of a natural writer with a feeling for  words, an ear for rhythm and a keen eye for character – someone, in fact, to whom the novel form would be entirely congenial.

Wilhemina Anderson’s family came from Unst in Shetland, but Willa was born (in 1890) and brought up in Montrose. She went to St Andrews on a bursary, gained a First in Classics, but refused a job offered on the strength of it because she did not want to be parted from a favourite rugby footballer. She soon lost interest in the rugby footballer, and when she met Edwin Muir – then a tormented, Nietzschean young writer from Orkney living in Glasgow – she was vice-principal of a London teachers’ training college. She lost her job because of her marriage (in 1919) and devoted herself to restoring Edwin’s balance and encouraging him to write. She worked only to keep the wolf from the door – running courses for shop workers, teaching in schools, and so on. The wolf never left the neighbourhood for long, and when they left the neighbourhood themselves it followed them about. Willa and Edwin travelled, in fact, all over Europe, and together translated more than forty books, the majority from the German. Willa, the better linguist, did the bulk of the work. They were most settled and happy while Edwin worked for the British Council in Edinburgh during the Second World War and in Rome after it, and later when he acted as Warden of Newbattle Abbey, a college of adult education in the Borders.

Willa’s own two essays in fiction were written not to make a name for herself but to buy bread and butter, and it was because they did not buy enough that she abandoned the novel. Yet Imagined Corners has a psychological perceptiveness, a philosophical realism and a sharp, affectionate detachment which seem to me a major contribution to that tradition of wisdom which has been so unaccountably ignored in Scottish fiction.

Willa was over forty when she wrote the novel (published in 1931), and that may explain its remarkable assurance. Soon after it was issued she wrote to Neil Gunn:

One thing I have learned from publishing a novel is that reviewers are apparently mostly half-wits, stupid both in praising and blaming … nobody, for instance, has  seen that the dreams I give my characters are meant to be at least as important as their waking actions: that William Murray is another version of Elizabeth in different circumstances: that opinions put into the mouths of my characters are not necessarily mine: and that I was trying to illumine life, not to reform it; to follow my own light, not deliberately to explore blind-alleys in Scotland; although, being Scottish, my approach to any universal problem is bound to be by way of Scottish characters …

She says, too, in Belonging, her memoir of life with Edwin, ‘we females were strong natural forces deserving a free status of our own as free citizens.’ Accordingly, Imagined Corners asks the question: How can a sensitive and intelligent woman avoid being crushed or stultified by the narrow conventions of a small Scottish town?

Willa knows well enough that conventions are necessary and laws inevitable; what concerns her is their effect upon those in the community with the greatest potential for creative feeling. She herself explained in Belonging that the origin of the book was to imagine what might have happened had she married her rugby footballer and settled in Montrose. The story of Hector and Elizabeth is her answer, although Elizabeth Shand is by no means Willa Muir.

Each character in Imagined Corners needs freedom to follow personal insights and to test their validity; if they refuse these insights they refuse life itself. The book is a plea for integrity of spirit in the face of moral blindness. William Murray cannot help his demented brother Ned because he cannot gain his own balance; he hides in hell-fire dogmatism. Hector, the clan warrior lost in modern life, hides in drink. John Shand, the romantic, hides in business respectability. The only two characters in a rich complexity of intertwining relationships who prove capable of facing life honestly are Lizzie and Elizabeth Shand. When the unconventional Lizzie returns to Scotland each comes to recognize the value of her opposite. As Lizzie says, ‘You and I … would make one damned fine woman between us.’ The understanding they reach is an understanding between sceptical intellect and mystical intuition. Whereas Lizzie believes that people  can never really help one another, only themselves, Elizabeth replies that, on the contrary, people are necessarily part of one another, ‘only separate like waves rising out of the sea’. There is a sense in which both propositions are true.

Throughout the book Willa’s feminism is confident without being aggressive. There is always a healthy clarity about her view of things: The sexual instinct has such complicated emotional effects on men and women that its masquerade as a simple appetite ought not to be condoned.’

It might be held that the message of Imagined Corners is simple – the one way to deal with Scotland is to leave it. But what the story of Elizabeth and Lizzie seems to me to tell us is more universal: that the way to deal with life is to take risks, go deep, make your own discoveries and live by them. This may not be the last word in philosophy, but it is the view of a strong, intelligent woman. And there is much more in the novel than any message which can be derived from it. There is acute and painful observation of the ways in which men and women limit themselves and defend themselves from one another.

The book has a certain technical panache, and a high degree of calculation. There are deliberate shifts in character between the first part and the second, prompting a question whether such changes can be credible. For me, at least, the answer is yes. In all of us there are potentialities which different circumstances and relationships may bring out. A novelist’s job is to make circumstances and relationships authentic.

Willa wrote in Belonging that there was ‘sufficient material in Imagined Corners for two novels’, which she was ‘too amateurish to realise at the time’. She certainly gave herself problems in running simultaneously the stories of five sets of characters, but she seems to relish the challenge and due balance is kept without violence being done to a realistic view of people. If the book lacks tension it is because Willa is too detached to ‘let herself go’. This is at once a virtue and a limitation. On the whole Edwin’s words – written about Neil Gunn’s The Serpent – apply equally well to Imagined Corners: ‘The effect of imaginative maturity is to make you feel that everything you are shown is in its proper place and on its true scale.’

We may regret that Willa did not write more – only the sociological Mrs Grundy in Scotland, the grim and powerful Mrs Ritchie, and after Edwin’s death Belonging, Living with Ballads, and a slim book of genuinely amateurish poems. But Willa herself regretted nothing. She concluded Belonging with an expression of faith:

That was the end of our Story. It was not the end of the Fable, which never stops, so it was not the end of Edwin’s poetry, or of my belief in true love.

It was not the end of Willa’s novels, either. Imagined Corners is the work of a mind of high quality which is at home in the world. And that is rare.

J.B. Pick