ABSTRACT
The distinctive contribution of Mary MacPherson, Bell Robertson, Janet Hamilton, Mathilde Blind, and Violet Jacob to the literary culture of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Scotland has been largely forgotten, as their less-than-instant name-recognition might suggest. Like their fictional English counterparts present in the writings of Elizabeth Gaskell, studied in this volume by Alisa Clapp, these women gave gender-inflected expression 134to a culture marked by constant toil and material anxiety amid great natural beauty, but their attachment to their “mither tongue” also resonated with varying degrees of nationalist and anti-landlordist sentiments and a clear sympathetic identification with the hardships of fellow women. 1 To give a sense for some of the political themes that attracted these women, I will first examine three Victorian Scottish women poets – Mary MacPherson, Bell Robertson, and Janet Hamilton – who consciously tried to record some of the effects of agrarian immiseration, rural blight, and the disintegrating forces of urban conditions. I will then compare their work with that of Mathilde Blind’s narration of violent evictions as formal tragedy and consider briefly an attempt by a post-Victorian “internal outsider,” Violet Jacob – an educated and sophisticated member of East Angus society – to recover some of the language-patterns and values she projected onto Scottish peasants. All along this spectrum of growing distance from agrarian life women sought to defend, then to preserve and recover social and linguistic patterns of agrarian life that steadily receded from view, and bridge the growing distance between an unreachable past and an ineluctable present.
