Imagined Selves: Imagined Corners, Mrs Ritchie, Selected Non-Fiction

Canongate Classics #69

by Willa Muir, Kirsty Allen (Editor)

This volume gathers together some of the real and the imagined lives of Willa Muir, one of the finest and fiercest intellectuals of her generation. Her writing is rich with paradox — although obsessively Scottish in subject and style, she resented Scotland; although a trenchant champion of feminism, she voluntarily sacrificed her identity to that of the ‘poet’s wife’; and although she was a committed reformer, she never aligned herself with any political or ideological movement. These passionate dichotomies are intertwined in her writing, giving a particular power to her fiction and non-fiction alike. This collection is the first publication to offer a sense of the diversity of Willa Muir’s oeuvre. It makes possible the re-evaluation of her work and assures her of a deserved place in the Scottish literary canon.

Genres: Fiction

778 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 1996

About the author

Willa Muir was a Scottish novelist, essayist and translator. She was born Wilhelmina Johnston Anderson in Montrose in 1890. She studied Classics at the University of St. Andrews, graduating in 1910. In 1919 she married the poet Edwin Muir. Her Women: An Inquiry is a book-length feminist essay. She translated the works of many notable German authors including Franz Kafka.

Reviews

[Helena · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Passive, like grains of sand blown irrelevantly across a neat pattern on a linoleum-covered floor, two stray soldiers are whirled across the fields to Calderwick, blown from the very frontiers of humanity, where disparate ranks of men make a shore against the vast sea of death as millions of grains of sand that do not knit together make a shore against the formless ocean. Like two grains of sand blown by the wind the soldiers come back from death into an incredibly tidy and differentiated world; and as the train stops with a jolt two shapeless figures, dazed with fatigue and the revolution of time and space, stagger on to the platform, their accouterments clattering, and wait to find some assurance that they are home."

- Mrs. Ritchie