In 2015, KS
published a provocative piece in The Guardian, challenging publishers and authors to correct gender imbalance in the industry by making 2018 the year of publishing only women in the UK...
Author summary
Nan Shepherd
NS
, a Scotswoman, published between 1928 and 1934 three novels and a volume of poems. A volume of nature-writing or memoir about her relationship with the Cairngorm mountains proved unacceptable during the 1940s, and...
Publishing
Naomi Mitchison
NM
published with Canongate
of EdinburghThe Cleansing of the Knife, and other poems, which collects the poetry she wrote during World War Two.
Benton, Jill. Naomi Mitchison: A Biography. Pandora, 1992.
183
Sheridan, Dorothy, and Naomi Mitchison. “Introduction”. Among You Taking Notes . . . The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 15-24.
23n6
Publishing
Willa Muir
WM
had conceived and begun work on this novel by 1926, planning to set it in Montrose, her childhood town.
Muir, Willa. Belonging. Hogarth Press, 1968.
125
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, 1995, pp. 25-47.
43
She did not start working on it in earnest, however, until 1930...
Publishing
Rebecca West
The first edition, by Viking Press
in New York, was issued in two-volume boxed sets.
Hutchinson, G. Evelyn. A Preliminary List of the Writings of Rebecca West, 1912-1951. Yale University Library, 1957.
12-13
Geoff Dyer
, in his introduction to the Canongate
edition of 2006, notes West's probing of the painful...
Reception
Muriel Spark
In the run-up to Spark's centenary in 2018, Canongate
published in 2016 omnibus volumes which each contain the text of three of her novels, under titles like Spark's Satire and Spark's Europe, and Polygon
Textual Production
Ali Smith
AS
contributed a modern reworking of the Iphis and Ianthe myth from Ovid
's Metamorphoses to the Canongate
Myth Series; her short novel Girl Meets Boy resituates Ovid's classic tale of lesbian romance and gender...
Textual Production
Nan Shepherd
In 1987 the Edinburgh publisher Canongate
initiated a revival of interest in NS
. It reprinted The Quarry Wood that year, The Weatherhouse in 1988, and in 1996 an omnibus volume, The Grampian Quartet...
Textual Production
Ruth Rendell
In 1999 RR
wrote an introduction to St Paul
's Epistle to the Romans, for a Canongate
series of biblical books. She also edited with an introduction a collection of writing about murder entitled...
Textual Production
Willa Muir
Canongate
re-issued WM
's novels Imagined Corners and Mrs Ritchie in a volume, Imagined Selves, shared with her three essays Mrs Grundy in Scotland, Women: An Inquiry, and Women in Scotland.
MA
published one of the two opening titles in Canongate
's Myths series, a feminist retelling of Homer
's Odyssey entitled The Penelopiad, The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus.
“Start the Week”. BBC Radio 4.
Textual Production
P. D. James
In 1998 Canongate Books
published Pocket Canons Bible II, a selection of books of the Bible with introductions by assorted celebrities. PDJ
introduced the Acts of the Apostles.
Atwood says she first read the Odyssey at about fifteen and was unpleasantly struck by the fact that Odysseus, after his triumphal homecoming and reunion with his faithful wife, kills not only the suitors whom...
Textual Production
A. S. Byatt
ASB
contributed to Canongate
's series of retold myths a volume entitled Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, a compelling rendering of the stories fromNorse legend which she first encountered in early childhood.
Harrison, M. John. “Eve of destruction”. Guardian Weekly, 30 Sept. 2011, pp. 39-40.