Willa Muir

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WM , a twentieth-century Scotswoman, wrote in fiction and non-fiction about gender inequality, patriarchy, and the repressiveness of Calvinism, but never defined herself as a feminist. She was alert to the devaluing of women's work, although she played whole-heartedly the role of supportive wife to her better-known husband, the poet and critic Edwin Muir . She published two novels, a story, and several substantial essays on the condition of women and on Scottish culture.
Muir, Willa. Imagined Selves. Editor Allen, Kirsty, Canongate Classics.
prelims
Along with her husband she translated over forty volumes, mostly German fiction. She did some of these collaborative translations on her own, though library catalogues tend to assign responsibility differently from the way she does. Undoubtedly her own are those published under the pseudonym Agnes Neill Scott. After her husband's death in 1959, she edited a volume of his poetry and wrote an autobiography celebrating their forty-year marriage. She left unpublished work including two more novels.

Milestones

13 March 1890

Wilhelmina Johnstone Anderson (later WM) was born at 14 Chapel Place in Montrose, a small town in Angus, Scotland.
Her parents hailed from Unst in the Shetlands, which has been mistakenly named as her birthplace.
“Learning Journeys: Willa Muir, 1890-1970”. Writing Scotland: A Journey Through Scotland’s Literature.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Muir, Willa. Belonging. Hogarth Press.
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1930

WM and Edwin Muir published the first English translation of Franz Kafka 's unfinished novel The Castle (Die Schloss), six years after Kafka's death.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
under Kafka

By 2 July 1931

In her first novel, Imagined Corners, WM examined the repression and fragmentation of the self through two women who bear the same name but present opposing images of femininity.
Her title comes from John Donne 's magnificently oxymoronic depiction of the Day of Judgement: At the round earth's imagined corners, blow / Your trumpets, angels.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Elphinstone, Margaret. “Willa Muir: Crossing the Genres”. A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 400-15.
406
Smith, Ali. “And Woman Created Woman: Carswell, Shepherd and Muir, and the Self-Made Woman”. Gendering the Nation: Studies in Modern Scottish Literature, edited by Christopher Whyte, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 25-47.
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1969

WM 's Laconics, Jingles, and Other Verses (including Ballad of the Dominant Male) was privately published by the Enitharmon Press in a limited edition of 200 copies.
Boreas Books. http://replay.web.archive.org/20040714213036/http://www.orkneybooks.com/onlinebookshop/page.asp?tmplt=sys&wbpg=home.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

22 May 1970

Eleven years after the death of her husband , WM died of heart failure in hospital at Dunoon on the Isle of Bute.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth, Origins, Influences

13 March 1890

Wilhelmina Johnstone Anderson (later WM) was born at 14 Chapel Place in Montrose, a small town in Angus, Scotland.
Her parents hailed from Unst in the Shetlands, which has been mistakenly named as her birthplace.
“Learning Journeys: Willa Muir, 1890-1970”. Writing Scotland: A Journey Through Scotland’s Literature.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Muir, Willa. Belonging. Hogarth Press.
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