Scottish Literature

  • The Library Window

    The Library Window

    In this Victorian tale, a young woman recuperating at her aunt’s house in a Scottish town is spending a good deal of time looking out…

  • Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond

    Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond

    Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond—among the most compelling and thought-provoking of Margaret Oliphant’s works of short fiction—tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Lycett-Landon, “two…

  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Third Edition

    Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Third Edition

    First published in 1886 as a “shilling shocker,” Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde takes the basic struggle between good and evil and adds to the…

  • Treasure Island

    Treasure Island

    The adventure story told in Treasure Island has become a part of popular folklore. John Sutherland discusses the novel’s place in Stevenson’s biography and oeuvre…

  • Peter Pan

    Peter Pan

    For twenty-six years after his first mention of the character, J.M. Barrie worked on the story of Peter Pan as he appeared through different incarnations:…

  • The Sign of Four

    The Sign of Four

    Arthur Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes novel is both a detective story and an imperial romance. Ostensibly the story of Mary Morstan, a beautiful young…

  • Waverley

    Waverley

    Sir Walter Scott’s first novel, Waverley enjoyed tremendous popularity upon its first publication. The novel is set during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, which sought…

  • Phoebe Junior

    Phoebe Junior

    Margaret Oliphant, one of the most prolific and popular Victorian novelists, essayists, and reviewers, has been compared both in her day and our own to…

  • The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant

    The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant

    After the death of Margaret Oliphant—the prolific nineteenth-century novelist, biographer, essayist, reviewer, and prominent voice on the “woman question”—two well-intending relatives took the autobiographical manuscripts…

  • The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

    The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

    Set in early eighteenth-century Scotland, James Hogg’s masterpiece is a brilliant psychological study of religious fanaticism and the power of evil. Led on by his…

  • Plays on the Passions

    Plays on the Passions

    Baillie’s eminently readable dramas stand at the crossroads of the Scottish Enlightenment and early Romanticism, and compellingly engage with questions of women’s rights. Her exploration…

  • Memoirs of Modern Philosophers

    Memoirs of Modern Philosophers

    When the Anti-Jacobin Review described Memoirs of Modern Philosophers in 1800 as “the first novel of the day” and as proof that “all the female…

  • Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

    Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

    In Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Elizabeth Hamilton engages directly with the major issues of her day, from colonialism and the “New…