Short-stories are considered more difficult to market – which explains why Gentlemen of the West was first published as a novel – and in the case of Owens, writing only short stories and novellas seems to have contributed to the erroneous impression that she is not a fully-fledged author.

Passing through Yorkshire and Durham he paid a brief visit to the Farne Islands in a coble – ‘a hazardous species of boat’ – entering Scotland at. I wrenched myself off the seat and ran past the hut down the path then up over the top of the island like a mountain goat. The household is not simply dominantly male in terms of numbers, it is aggressively misogynistic, with a father prone to physical violence and a son who casually mentions his having “[gone] out for a gang bang” ( CSS 150). Literary talent predated this political event but it is only in its aftermath that there was a “proliferation of Scottish works on the literary market” ( ibid .Her short stories have also appeared alongside those of her friends and fellow authors James Kelman and Alasdair Gray in Lean Tales. Her writing was unsettling, this was not a world of ‘poor folk’ to be pitied but a frank, unflinching portrayal of hard lives, made compulsively readable by the quiet, prickling humour which bound her stories. The building turned out to be merely a hit, neatly boarded up and of no earthly interest, but beyond that was the entrance to a graveyard.

Although A Working Mother and For the Love of Willie are obviously worth reading individually, they do complete each other and the anecdote both narrators tell about being described as “sad apple” by American soldiers ( CN 185, 313) invites us to compare the stories of these women. In 1994 however she published A Working Mother about marriage to an alcoholic, and followed this up in 1998 with For the Love of Willie.At the time it was published short stories were considered more difficult to market, so Owens rewrote them with some continuity, and I think that works really well. Clearly the vulnerability of Mai, Betty and Peggy involves other elements than their gender – mainly issues of economic power and childhood’s frailty – yet in all cases we are dealing with women’s victimization by men.

It has begun with the teacher who “put a big cross” ( CSS 370) through the narrator’s partly autobiographical composition. The family finally arrived in the remote village of Scoraig, near Ullapool, but found none of their hopes realised and were forced to shelter in an outhouse.It actually contains one of the key moments of the novel, which would not be understood in short story form. While constantly depicting the precariousness of her characters’ lives, Owens shuns this word and uses the adjective “vulnerable” only three times in all her fiction, twice in A Working Mother , once in For the Love of Willie .

In “The Silver Cup”, for instance, Sammy’s father refuses to watch anything “which related to female predicaments” and “Sammy’s Ma had learned to keep her mouth shut about what she liked” ( CSS 146). This scene makes it clear that it is not simply that “kind of story” ( CSS 370) that normal people would like to cross out of sight but, more precisely, that kind of people. In addition, the student will benefit from extensive oral history training from the Scottish Oral History Centre at Strathclyde (SOHC).She is, however, prone to self-pity while Owens never seems to indulge in self-pity in her interviews and insists on the importance of humour in her fiction, albeit a dark kind of humour. and in the 1990s “the British book world became aware of Scottish writing as a distinctive entity” (Cumrey 37). The snag was, I had to be obedient, well mannered and speak with a proper accent which was the hardest thing to do. This project will absorb and supersede these contexts in its collation and critical appraisal of Owens’ full literary output, leading to a variety of public-facing events marking the centenary of her birth in 2026. If we consider her works, the fact is that many of her protagonists are women and that in her denunciation of their predicaments, her position is not strikingly different from that of women rights’ supporters.