Isobel Murray is a Scottish literary scholar, Emeritus Professor at the University of Aberdeen. She edited the work of Oscar Wilde and Naomi Mitchison. She also edited a series of interviews which she and her husband Bob Tait carried out with Scottish writers, and wrote a biography of the writer Jessie Kesson.
Murray gained her MA at Edinburgh University. She then went to the University of Aberdeen, where she became a senior lecturer and eventually professor. In 1976 she married fellow academic Bob Tait. The couple "formed a pair of literary lions, hosting memorable parties and discussions at their flat for guests such as novelists Archie Hind and William McIlvanney, who became the university’s first writer in residence at their suggestion." [1]
Murray's 2000 biography of Jessie Kesson won the National Library of Scotland / Saltire Society Scottish Research Book of the Year award. [2]
Scottish literature is literature written in Scotland or by Scottish writers. It includes works in English, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Brythonic, French, Latin, Norn or other languages written within the modern boundaries of Scotland.
Neil Miller Gunn was a prolific novelist, critic, and dramatist who emerged as one of the leading lights of the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. With over twenty novels to his credit, Gunn was arguably the most influential Scottish fiction writer of the first half of the 20th century.
The Scottish Renaissance was a mainly literary movement of the early to mid-20th century that can be seen as the Scottish version of modernism. It is sometimes referred to as the Scottish literary renaissance, although its influence went beyond literature into music, visual arts, and politics. The writers and artists of the Scottish Renaissance displayed a profound interest in both modern philosophy and technology, as well as incorporating folk influences, and a strong concern for the fate of Scotland's declining languages.
Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often called a doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography. Her husband Dick Mitchison's life peerage in 1964 entitled her to call herself Lady Mitchison, but she never did. Her 1931 work, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, is seen by some as the prime 20th-century historical novel.
Anna "Nan" Shepherd was a Scottish Modernist writer and poet, best known for her seminal mountain memoir, The Living Mountain, based on experiences of hill walking in the Cairngorms. This is noted as an influence by nature writers who include Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She also wrote poetry and three novels set in small fictional communities in Northern Scotland. The landscape and weather of this area played a major role in her novels and provided a focus for her poetry. Shepherd served as a lecturer in English at the Aberdeen College of Education for most of her working life.
David Ditchburn is a Scottish historian. He is a senior lecturer at Trinity College Dublin.
Sir Robert Keith was a Scottish nobleman and a hereditary Great Marischal of Scotland.
Jessie Kesson, born Jessie Grant McDonald, was a Scottish novelist, playwright and radio producer.
Rosalind Mary Mitchison FRSE was a 20th-century English historian and academic who specialised in Scottish social history. She was affectionately known as "Rowy" Mitchison.
Edward James Cowan FRSE was a Scottish historian.
Annie Shepherd Swan, CBE was a Scottish journalist and fiction writer. She wrote mainly in her maiden name, but also as David Lyall and later Mrs Burnett Smith. A writer of romantic fiction for women, she had over 200 novels, serials, stories and other fiction published between 1878 and her death. She has been called "one of the most commercially successful popular novelists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". Swan was politically active in the First World War, and as a suffragist, a Liberal activist and founder-member and vice-president of the Scottish National Party.
Clan Cumming, also known as Clan Comyn, is a Scottish clan from the central Highlands that played a major role in the history of 13th-century Scotland and in the Wars of Scottish Independence. The Clan Comyn was once the most powerful family in 13th-century Scotland, until they were defeated in civil war by their rival to the Scottish throne, Robert the Bruce.
The novel in Scotland includes all long prose fiction published in Scotland and by Scottish authors since the development of the literary format in the eighteenth century. The novel was soon a major element of Scottish literary and critical life. Tobias Smollett's picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle mean that he is often seen as Scotland's first novelist. Other Scots who contributed to the development of the novel in the eighteenth century include Henry Mackenzie and John Moore.
Literature in modern Scotland is literature written in Scotland, or by Scottish writers, since the beginning of the twentieth century. It includes literature written in English, Scottish Gaelic and Scots in forms including poetry, novels, drama and the short story.
Andrew Hook, FBA, FRSE, is Emeritus Bradley Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow.
Events from the year 1839 in Scotland.
Aileen Christianson was Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She was well known as a scholar of Scottish literature and women's writing, and as senior editor of 'The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle' and of collections of Scottish women's writing. Her experience over decades made her a recognised authority on both Carlyles. She gained an MA (hons.) in English and History from the University of Aberdeen in 1966.
Julian Goodare is a professor of history at University of Edinburgh.
Maureen M. Meikle is an academic historian.
William Alexander LLD was a Scottish journalist and author. His most widely known novel Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk, paints a vivid picture of economic and social relations in a rural parish in Aberdeenshire during the 1840s, against the background of the Disruption in the Scottish Kirk.