Tracing the development of Scottish women’s writing from the genesis in the late eighteenth century into the subsequent two, Scottish Women Writers explores the changing times and women writing across a range of formats and genres over the years. You can read an extract from the chapter ‘Multi-taskers’ below for a taste of what to expect. 

Scottish Women Writers: from 1800 to the Great War
By Eileen Dunlop
Published by National Museums Scotland 

The word ‘multitasking’ is a modern one, first coined in 1965 to describe a computer function, but used more recently to suggest the necessity in a hectic life of performing a multiplicity of tasks; juggling more than one job while running a household, bringing up children, and, for many people, making financial ends meet. After the end of the Great War in 1918, the ready supply of inexpensive live-in servants had slowed, then dried up, but not until the late twentieth century did the expectation that men would share the responsibility of household chores and bringing up children become widespread. Previously, when the reality of multitasking existed without a definition, the burden was laid almost exclusively on women. 

As in more recent times, nineteenth-century women writers had different motivations. Some had independent means, so were free to choose their genres and write for their own pleasure; some hoped to supplement a less secure income, while the brave, often driven by necessity, attempted to live by their writing alone. Among the women writers already mentioned, Mary Brunton had the support of her husband and Susan Ferrier of her father. Susan might with justice have seen herself as a multitasker, juggling household obligations to find time to write, but she was not so in a literary sense. Apart from letters she concentrated on fiction, and it is as a novelist that she is known. It was the financially insecure who did not have the luxury of choice. Not for them were proof correcting and business arrangements ‘among the minor pleasures of life’. If they found in themselves a talent for writing, exigency forced them to be versatile, moving from journalism to fiction, biography and travel writing to poetry, as opportunity arose. Those women who succeeded in this largely male-dominated industry deserve to be remembered as pioneers. 

Elizabeth Hamilton, author of The Cottagers of Glenburnie had fewer advantages than Brunton and Ferrier. Unmarried, deprived of her brother’s support by his unexpected death in 1792 and unable to find employment due to her own chronic ill health, she had little option but to try her luck as a professional writer. Well-educated for a woman in her time, she had attended school in Stirling, and later public lectures on philosophy in Glasgow and Edinburgh, but most of her formidable knowledge had to be acquired by private reading. Before settling in Edinburgh in 1804, she had already proved her versatility, publishing titles as diverse as Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), for which she drew on the experience of her brother, who had been in the service of the East India Company, and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), a satirical novel featuring an absurd ‘bluestocking’, Miss Bridgetina Botherim; such pretentiously intellectual women were fair game for novelists of the period. In 1801 she published Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, the first of many books and articles on educational topics, and in the year of her move to Edinburgh took a subject from Roman history, Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus. This was a brave choice, at a time when classical studies and biography were assumed to be the preserve of university-educated men. 

Given the general prejudice against women writers, Hamilton’s success was remarkable; apart from an annual pension of £50 from King George III, she supported herself by writing alone until her death in 1816. She was among the first literary multitaskers of the nineteenth century, even if she is now remembered only as the author of The Cottagers of Glenburnie. 

A literary multitasker of a different kind, whose life overlapped with Hamilton’s, was Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781–1857), of whose early years tantalisingly little is known. She has been identified as Christian Todd, born in Edinburgh in 1781, and it seems likely, given her wide knowledge and literary talent, that her parents were of the middle class. But as to who they were, and where and how they lived, nothing has been satisfactorily established. It is believed that at an early age Christian Isobel married a man whose surname was McLeish, and a few years later divorced him. Only after 1812 do facts supersede supposition; in that year she married a Dunfermline schoolmaster, John Johnstone and, when he became owner and editor of the Inverness Courier, moved with him to Inverness. The level of Christian Isobel’s education and commitment now becomes clear, since she immediately became involved in the business, and is credited with giving the Courier a more literary bias than was usual in a provincial newspaper. It was here too that she acquired the deep knowledge of Highland life and culture displayed in her best-known novel Clan-Albin: A National Tale (1815). 

The Johnstones’ decision to move to Edinburgh, then a hub of publishing and journalism which rivalled London, proved their ambition. John Johnstone opened a printing office in James Square and, using funds from the sale of the Inverness Courier, bought jointly with the publisher William Blackwood (1776–1834) The Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle. This partnership, however, was doomed to failure, since the liberal principles of the Johnstones clashed with those of the arch-Tory Blackwood, leading them to sell their share. Aware of the market for publications which the literate poor could afford, and using their own printing press, the Johnstones then ran a number of periodicals, including The Schoolmaster and Edinburgh Weekly Magazine, with a cover price of 1½d and written almost entirely by Christian Isobel. This publication was converted in 1832 into Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine, which in turn amalgamated with the better-known Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. As well as agreeing to her demand that the price of Tait’s be cut from 2s 6d (12½p) to 1s (5p), William Tait (1792–1864) showed his confidence by giving Christian Isobel most of the editorial responsibility, along with a salary and half ownership of the magazine. 

After that, there was nothing to hold her back. 

Scottish Women Writers: from 1800 to the Great War  by Eileen Dunlop is published by National Museums Scotland, priced £14.99.