Imagined Selves

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Willa Muir. Imagined Selves

Introduction

Contents

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IV

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Contents

BOOK I: THE CHILD

BOOK II: THE GIRL

BOOK III: THE WOMAN

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BOOK IV: THE WOMAN

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Contents

Dame Grundy

MRS GRUNDY TO MR BRIGHT

MRS GRUNDY ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Mrs Grundy Comes to Scotland

MUSIC OF SCOTCH WATERFOWL

Mrs MacGrundy. I

II

III

A Spot of Detective Work

The Victorian Age

Scotswomen

Grundy versus MacGrundy

MacGrundy in the Highlands

Interlude on Strychnine

Grundy versus the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street

Introductory

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Women in Scotland from Left Review 1936

About the Author. IMAGINED SELVES

Copyright

Отрывок из книги

This volume gathers together, for the first time, some of the real and the imagined lives of Willa Muir, one of the finest female intellectuals that Scotland has produced this century. Many of her works have been out of print for more than fifty years; others have never yet been published. Here, at last, is another major missing piece from the jigsaw of Scottish women’s writing.

Willa Muir is an enigmatic character. She prided herself upon her forthright honesty and conversational bluntness; yet behind the façade of robust simplicity lurked a muddle of conflicting ideologies and multiple selves. Her life embodies the contradictions and paradoxes which suffuse her writing, lending it a sense of rich and troubled tension. She was a Scot who resented Scotland, although her writing is obsessively Scottish in its themes and attitudes. She was an enthusiastic, evangelising champion of gender equality; yet she voluntarily sacrificed her own identity to that of ‘the poet’s wife’. She was a committed reformer who never aligned herself with any political or ideological movement. She was a catalyst for the minds of philosophers and artists. She presided over cultural coteries in the Scotland of MacDiarmid’s Renaissance, and the 1930s London of Eliot, Spender and Pound. She won universal admiration for her conversational brilliance and energy as well as for the power of her mind. And yet, in spite of all this, her own publications were greeted with a surprising and resounding indifference. This volume proves that they were, in fact, often ground-breaking and progressive insights into central issues of culture and gender.

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Mabel could not resist the reflection that Hector had survived more shameless facts than unconcealed chamberpots. Nor was Elizabeth likely to be a stickler for propriety.

The flicker of mirth in her face did not escape Aunt Janet, who became almost voluminous as she enfolded young Mrs John in benevolence.

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