Breakers

by Nancy Brysson Morrison, Mary Seenan (Introduction)

Originally published in 1930, Breakers, the first novel by Nancy Brysson Morrison, explores the damage that rejection and frustrated potential can inflict. Following a casual affair with a local farmer's son, Euphemia Gillespie, daughter of the disillusioned and ineffectual minister of Barnfingal, is sent into the obscurity of the coastal village of Stonemerns where she gives birth to a son.

Left in the care of a former family servant, Callum Lamont grows up a troubled soul ignorant of his true parentage. Finding some measure of happiness in his work as a farm labourer on the farm of Inchbuigh, where he also encounters first love, his life promises some future contentment. Callum's plans are shattered, however, when Inchbuigh becomes a victim of the Highland Clearances - the account of which offers a unique literary portrayal of the period - and on being driven back to Stonemerns he discovers his mother's name and social status. Determined to claim his birthright, he travels to Barnfingal, where he sets in motion a sequence of events that bring disaster not only to his mother's family, but also to himself. Breakers is then a chilling account of the ramifications of abandonment - both by the individual and by the cruel legislators of Scotland in the early nineteenth century.

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Agnes Morrison or Agnes Brysson Inglis Morrison; Nancy Morrison was a Scottish writer. She wrote biographies, novels and some romantic fiction. Known for writing about Scottish history and for focusing on those usually lost to history. She also wrote under the pseudonym Christine Strathern.