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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.

Muir’s commitment to the feminist cause exerts a particularly profound influence upon her writing. She was an early supporter of suffrage and a very vocal advocate of women’s rights. As a student at St Andrews University in the years immediately before the First World War, she was a founder member of the controversial Women Students Suffrage Society and a leading proponent of the equal rights of women to an academic education. The brilliance of her mind never gave her any cause to doubt her intellectual parity with anyone—male or female.

Women: An Inquiry (1925) explores some of her earliest theorising about gender and the necessity of completely integrating women into every echelon of an enlightened society. As a thesis, it is as entertaining as it is intellectually unconvincing. To the late twentieth-century reader, and in the light of modern feminist thinking, it seems sadly dated and misguided; but in its own historical context and as a work contemporary with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own it is a fascinating document which offers a remarkable analysis of the nature of femaleness.

Its most fatal flaw is its postulation of the absolute symbiosis and complementarity of mutually exclusive male and female characteristics; and its conclusion that both men and women have a pre-ordained societal rôle. The work is an unconscious endorsement of the patriarchal system which had kept women in the home—and in the submissive position against which Muir constantly rebelled. A beautifully ironic postscript is added to the thesis in a comment which Muir—in all seriousness and as an illustrative instance of her schizophrenic feminism—made in a letter to Violet Schiff shortly before the work was published:

I hope you like the essay. It is not good enough to make me feel confident; as a matter of fact, I am a little twittery about it. If I had been a man I could have done it with less effort.1

Her thoughts about gender developed with the years and with the societal changes of an ageing century; but she never relinquished her vision of absolute equality.

While her husband, Edwin, favoured the ‘myth’ at the expense of the ‘story’, she emphatically and exuberantly inhabited the world and ‘belong [ed] to the Universe’.2 She was an ironically meticulous witness to the foibles and foolishness of humanity, often unnervingly astute in her ability to caricature or capture the essence of a personality or a society. Mrs Grundy in Scotland (1936) adroitly creates a complex socio-cultural indictment of a national psyche from a stock of minute observations. It is an undiscovered gem of Scottish historical thinking and an explicit illustration of Muir’s quirky brilliance as a social commentator.

Her professional expertise was in the psychological field. As a postgraduate student in experimental child psychology at Bedford College during the First World War, she constructed an ‘analysis of the problems raised by sex in education’,3 and developed an enduring interest in the workings of the conscious and the unconscious intellect. It was a fascination which invariably and incessantly insinuated itself into the fabric of her fiction and informed the minds and motivations of her characters.

This psychologised fiction is perhaps most successfully and persuasively realised in the sections of Imagined Corners which explore the painfully emergent self-knowledge of Elizabeth Shand and Elise Mütze. These two Elizabeths embody the qualities of quiet endurance and undemonstrative resilience which are common to all of the women in Muir’s fiction. Elise is an instinctive feminist with the intelligence and the courage to recognise and release herself from the shackles of the patriarchal Presbyterian culture of her Calderwick childhood. She has sacrificed neither her femaleness nor her freedom to the emotional and physical hardships which have been the product of her convictions, and has consequently developed an indomitable and exquisite awareness of herself and her world.

Elizabeth Shand, in comparison, appears initially to be a victim of the culture in which she has been reared. An underdeveloped sense of self has caused her to confuse lust for love in her relationship with Hector; her vision of marriage is entirely shaped by the time-worn expectations and stereotypes of a patriarchal society. She, like Hector, has always:

… accepted unthinkingly the suggestion that women were the guardians of decorum—good women, that is to say, women who could not be referred to as ‘skirts’. Good women existed to keep in check men’s sensual passions. A man, driven by physical desire … is mad and reckless, and his sole protection from himself is the decorum of women.

It is only when Elizabeth is finally freed from Hector (and his unreasonable and inbred expectations) that she can begin to explore the emotional and intellectual aspects of herself which extend beyond the bounds of Hector’s all-consuming physicality.

She saw with immediate clearness that it was only inside a room, in the world of talk, of articulate expression, that Hector was trivial. Out of doors, with no roof but the sky, he was like an impersonal force. In loving Hector she had loved something transcending both of them.

The life which had streamed out through her feet, as if into a sea out of which all creatures rose like waves, returned upon itself as she lay rigid and flowed up—up, like sap rising, until she felt as if her head were branching. This was the other end of her vision, and she knew what it represented. It was the world that Elise had recalled to her, the world of thought, of ideas, spreading into the vast impersonal abstractions which made another infinity.

There is, without a doubt, a certain latent and inherent strength in Elizabeth’s character which will carry her beyond the pain of the novel’s closing pages and onwards into a new world of independence, self-knowledge and self-reliance. Self and sisters are, as both Elizabeth Shand and Sarah Murray learn, the only real sources of strength and support upon which a woman can rely: ‘If it wasn’t for the women the world would be in a gey queer state. And the women got little credit for it.’

The radically feminist assertiveness of the fiction is curiously incompatible with Women: An Inquiry’s conservative exploration of the symbiosis and complementarity of the sexes. The cautious traditionalism of the theory is infinitely removed from the explosive and unconventional extremes by which Muir’s fictional characters assert their individuality and independence. Elise in Imagined Corners consciously sacrifices her ‘respectability’ on the altar of freedom and, consequently, lives a life of banishment and exile; Elizabeth Shand’s rejection of Scotland and of men is a somewhat revolutionary renunciation of her roots and her marriage; and Annie Ritchie’s pursuit of a meaningful identity in Mrs Ritchie drives her to practise the most horrifying and domineering tyranny.

The institution of marriage is rendered virtually meaningless and moribund by the force of this necessarily strident and assertive individualism; Muir paints an overwhelmingly pessimistic picture of the relationship between men and women. Hector and Elizabeth’s relationship, for example, is the product of a purely primitive and physical attraction and is utterly devoid of any emotional or intellectual communion. Each of them is in love with an ideal partner and a model marriage; and not with a realistic sense of self and other. Their entire relationship is apparently built upon a rôle-play of social constructs.

Johnny and Annie’s marriage in Mrs Ritchie is also born out of deceit and disguise. The young Annie Rattray’s mask of gently wooing womanhood utterly blinds Johnny to the terrifying harridan within—and ultimately traps him into the baleful hell of a loveless and soul-destroying marriage.

[T] he warmth, the answering, absolving tenderness that he was entreating remained locked away and inaccessible, locked up like the prim, clean house and to the door that guarded it Johnny Ritchie could not find the key.

The only apparently positive and mutually fulfilling union within these two novels is Elise and Karl’s undoubted love match—but this relationship has, significantly, been consigned to a mythical past before Imagined Corners actually begins. And the reader gradually learns that even the liberated and independent Elise has been a reluctant muse and mother to her beloved Karl.

Her vitality, he had said, was all he needed to provide him with vegetative material on which to feed … Women were like grass, he said; they were the fundamental nourishment … Anonymous nourishment, thought Madame Mütze, remembering how she had objected to the description.

Muir was only too aware of the painful and frustrating invisibility which was implicit in ‘nourishing’ a poet.

Muir’s own artistic creativity and the trail of her narrative occasionally become submerged beneath a tide of professional psychologising. Mrs Ritchie was justifiably criticised by various contemporary reviewers for its spate of abstract theorising and its disconcerting resemblance, in places, to a psychological ‘case study’.

Dislike untouched by the humour that turns it to satire or by the humanity that gives the miscreant at least the semblance of a sporting chance, is a dangerous emotion for the artist; and the acrimony shown here towards the subject is not of the kind that vivifies creation. In spite of the careful photography of the details, the lingering thoroughness of the dissection, the result is nearer to science than to art, and not to the more vital form of science.4

And yet this justifiable criticism ought not to blind the reader to the powerful and profound story which lurks behind the almost overly academic analysis. The alienatingly unsympathetic portrayal of Annie Ritchie in the novel’s later pages is amply counterbalanced by the earthily attractive figure of Bet Reid and the sensitively delineated character of Sarah Annie. The novel also offers an uncompromisingly and uncomfortably explicit indictment of the rationale and the horrifying reality of the Great War. Muir always described the 1914 war as ‘the great shock in my adult life … which knocked me to pieces for a while’;5 and Mrs Ritchie embodies her abhorrence of the false incitements by which men and nations are driven into conflict.

What made it ghastly was the systematic organization of warfare under the banner of Bunk, making chaps fight for Bunk called patriotism or Bunk called God. A man could fight and be reconciled to his enemy and quit fighting; but Bunk could go on fighting for ever and ever. Amen … A man could use his fists, or even a bayonet, a bomb, or a rifle, but Bunk used big guns and tanks and poison-gas. A man could kill his enemy and be quit of him, but Bunk preached immortality and kept alive a mob of vengeful ghosts.

Muir’s own voice and vision are never far beneath the surface psychologising, politicising and philosophising of her fiction. She was utterly incapable of dissociating herself from her critique of the actions and the actors in her fiction. By the same token, versions of herself and of her life populate each of her novels to such an extent that autobiography and fiction become inseparable; we are brought face-to-face with the author through her writings. Imagined Corners is a virtual retelling of Muir’s Montrose childhood and portrays the author in the combined Elizabeths; a later and unpublished novel entitled Mrs Muttoe and the Top Storey is an undiluted record of the three happy years which the Muirs spent in Hampstead in the early 1930s; and The Usurpers, a 1950s novel about her post-war experiences with the British Council in Prague, is almost libellously factual.

There might even be a certain desperation in this relentless mirroring and expression of her own life and personality. Willa Muir’s adult life was haunted by a fear of the anonymity of the ‘poet’s wife’; of being merely the willing catalyst to Edwin’s creativity; of being silenced by his greatness. It was a fear without resentment; she loved him passionately, completely and enduringly. But occasionally, and especially in her later years, she was wistfully regretful about the conscious sacrifice of her own claims to literary eminence.

I am a better translator than he is. The whole current of patriarchal society is set against this fact, however and sweeps it into oblivion, simply because I did not insist on shouting aloud: ‘Most of this translation, especially Kafka, has been done by me. Edwin only helped.’ And every time Edwin was referred to as the translator, I was too proud to say anything; and Edwin himself felt it would be undignified to speak up, I suppose. So that now, especially since my break-down in the middle of the war, I am left without a shred of literary reputation. And I am ashamed of the fact that I feel it as a grievance. It shouldn’t bother me. Reputation is a passing value, after all. Yet it is now that I feel it, now when I am trying to build up my life again and overcome my disabilities: my dicky back-bone for instance. Because I seem to have nothing to build on, except that I am Edwin’s wife and he still loves me. That is much. It is more in a sense than I deserve. And I know, too, how destructive ambition is, and how it deforms what one might create. And yet, and yet, I want to be acknowledged.6

It is a tragically modest request, and one which her lifetime never granted. The publication of this collection of her writings is the first real recognition of her qualities as a writer and as an intellectual. We can at last re-evaluate her work and assure her of her deserved place within the Scottish canon.

And yet we must beware the natural and proprietorial urge to nationalise her. Paradoxical personalities are resistant to simple classifications. Her Scottish pedigree and her alliance with the writers of the Scottish Renaissance should not blind us to her internationalist qualifications. Nor should we glibly slot her into the ‘feminist’ category, simply because she was a woman writer with a female agenda. She was, throughout her lifetime, denied her literary independence and individuality; now her reputation deserves its autonomy.

This volume is a celebration of the life and work of Willa Muir.

Kirsty A. Allen

1. Willa Muir in a letter to Violet Schiff. Dated from Montrose, 25 November 1924. From the collection of Muir/Schiff correspondence in the British Library, London.

2. Willa Muir, Belonging (p. 14). London: The Hogarth Press, 1968.

3. Appendix E, Annual Report 1916. The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.

4. Anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement, 13 July 1933.

5. Willa Muir. Belonging, (p. 20). London: The Hogarth Press, 1968.

6. Willa Muir. Journal 1951–53 (20 August 1953) Box 6. Willa Muir archive in the University of St Andrews Library.