ABSTRACT
To accommodate, or, what is more, to prioritise silenced female otherness against received assumptions, sweeping categorisations and commodifying strategies is central to Galloway's attempt "to write as a woman, to be as honest about it as possible" and "to produce a cutting-edge, a voice". Galloway's early fiction The Trick is to Keep Breathing and the short story collection Blood articulates women's voices mainly in relation to the conflicts that affect female experience within the patriarchal contemporary Scottish context, in which women are denied full subjective status. Critics of Galloway's work have not failed to note what seems an evident fact: namely, the "anti-'Scottish' trajectory" of her writing. The affinity between, on the one hand, the consideration of women's concerns as add-ons to men's engagement with real, serious issues. On the other, the short story as a nearly negligible supplement to the truly significant work of novel-writing goes deep in Galloway's case.
