Introduction
This volume gathers together, for the first time, some of the real and the imagined lives of Willa Muir, one of the finest female intellectuals that Scotland has produced this century. Many of her works have been out of print for more than fifty years; others have never yet been published. Here, at last, is another major missing piece from the jigsaw of Scottish women’s writing.
Willa Muir is an enigmatic character. She prided herself upon her forthright honesty and conversational bluntness; yet behind the façade of robust simplicity lurked a muddle of conflicting ideologies and multiple selves. Her life embodies the contradictions and paradoxes which suffuse her writing, lending it a sense of rich and troubled tension. She was a Scot who resented Scotland, although her writing is obsessively Scottish in its themes and attitudes. She was an enthusiastic, evangelising champion of gender equality; yet she voluntarily sacrificed her own identity to that of ‘the poet’s wife’. She was a committed reformer who never aligned herself with any political or ideological movement. She was a catalyst for the minds of philosophers and artists. She presided over cultural coteries in the Scotland of MacDiarmid’s Renaissance, and the 1930s London of Eliot, Spender and Pound. She won universal admiration for her conversational brilliance and energy as well as for the power of her mind. And yet, in spite of all this, her own publications were greeted with a surprising and resounding indifference. This volume proves that they were, in fact, often ground-breaking and progressive insights into central issues of culture and gender.
Muir’s commitment to the feminist cause exerts a particularly profound influence upon her writing. She was an early supporter of suffrage and a very vocal advocate of women’s rights. As a student at St Andrews University in the years immediately before the First World War, she was a founder member of the controversial Women Students Suffrage Society and a leading proponent of the equal rights of women to an academic education. The brilliance of her mind never gave her any cause to doubt her intellectual parity with anyone—male or female.
Women: An Inquiry (1925) explores some of her earliest theorising about gender and the necessity of completely integrating women into every echelon of an enlightened society. As a thesis, it is as entertaining as it is intellectually unconvincing. To the late twentieth-century reader, and in the light of modern feminist thinking, it seems sadly dated and misguided; but in its own historical context and as a work contemporary with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own it is a fascinating document which offers a remarkable analysis of the nature of femaleness.
Its most fatal flaw is its postulation of the absolute symbiosis and complementarity of mutually exclusive male and female characteristics; and its conclusion that both men and women have a pre-ordained societal rôle. The work is an unconscious endorsement of the patriarchal system which had kept women in the home—and in the submissive position against which Muir constantly rebelled. A beautifully ironic postscript is added to the thesis in a comment which Muir—in all seriousness and as an illustrative instance of her schizophrenic feminism—made in a letter to Violet Schiff shortly before the work was published:
I hope you like the essay. It is not good enough to make me feel confident; as a matter of fact, I am a little twittery about it. If I had been a man I could have done it with less effort.1
Her thoughts about gender developed with the years and with the societal changes of an ageing century; but she never relinquished her vision of absolute equality.
While her husband, Edwin, favoured the ‘myth’ at the expense of the ‘story’, she emphatically and exuberantly inhabited the world and ‘belong [ed] to the Universe’.2 She was an ironically meticulous witness to the foibles and foolishness of humanity, often unnervingly astute in her ability to caricature or capture the essence of a personality or a society. Mrs Grundy in Scotland (1936) adroitly creates a complex socio-cultural indictment of a national psyche from a stock of minute observations. It is an undiscovered gem of Scottish historical thinking and an explicit illustration of Muir’s quirky brilliance as a social commentator.
Her professional expertise was in the psychological field. As a postgraduate student in experimental child psychology at Bedford College during the First World War, she constructed an ‘analysis of the problems raised by sex in education’,3 and developed an enduring interest in the workings of the conscious and the unconscious intellect. It was a fascination which invariably and incessantly insinuated itself into the fabric of her fiction and informed the minds and motivations of her characters.
This psychologised fiction is perhaps most successfully and persuasively realised in the sections of Imagined Corners which explore the painfully emergent self-knowledge of Elizabeth Shand and Elise Mütze. These two Elizabeths embody the qualities of quiet endurance and undemonstrative resilience which are common to all of the women in Muir’s fiction. Elise is an instinctive feminist with the intelligence and the courage to recognise and release herself from the shackles of the patriarchal Presbyterian culture of her Calderwick childhood. She has sacrificed neither her femaleness nor her freedom to the emotional and physical hardships which have been the product of her convictions, and has consequently developed an indomitable and exquisite awareness of herself and her world.
Elizabeth Shand, in comparison, appears initially to be a victim of the culture in which she has been reared. An underdeveloped sense of self has caused her to confuse lust for love in her relationship with Hector; her vision of marriage is entirely shaped by the time-worn expectations and stereotypes of a patriarchal society. She, like Hector, has always:
… accepted unthinkingly the suggestion that women were the guardians of decorum—good women, that is to say, women who could not be referred to as ‘skirts’. Good women existed to keep in check men’s sensual passions. A man, driven by physical desire … is mad and reckless, and his sole protection from himself is the decorum of women.
It is only when Elizabeth is finally freed from Hector (and his unreasonable and inbred expectations) that she can begin to explore the emotional and intellectual aspects of herself which extend beyond the bounds of Hector’s all-consuming physicality.
She saw with immediate clearness that it was only inside a room, in the world of talk, of articulate expression, that Hector was trivial. Out of doors, with no roof but the sky, he was like an impersonal force. In loving Hector she had loved something transcending both of them.
The life which had streamed out through her feet, as if into a sea out of which all creatures rose like waves, returned upon itself as she lay rigid and flowed up—up, like sap rising, until she felt as if her head were branching. This was the other end of her vision, and she knew what it represented. It was the world that Elise had recalled to her, the world of thought, of ideas, spreading into the vast impersonal abstractions which made another infinity.
There is, without a doubt, a certain latent and inherent strength in Elizabeth’s character which will carry her beyond the pain of the novel’s closing pages and onwards into a new world of independence, self-knowledge and self-reliance. Self and sisters are, as both Elizabeth Shand and Sarah Murray learn, the only real sources of strength and support upon which a woman can rely: ‘If it wasn’t for the women the world would be in a gey queer state. And the women got little credit for it.’
The radically feminist assertiveness of the fiction is curiously incompatible with Women: An Inquiry’s conservative exploration of the symbiosis and complementarity of the sexes. The cautious traditionalism of the theory is infinitely removed from the explosive and unconventional extremes by which Muir’s fictional characters assert their individuality and independence. Elise in Imagined Corners consciously sacrifices her ‘respectability’ on the altar of freedom and, consequently, lives a life of banishment and exile; Elizabeth Shand’s rejection of Scotland and of men is a somewhat revolutionary renunciation