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This chapter examines women's authorship and patronage of poetry in Irish. It focuses on the keen (caoineadh), in which the female speaker laments the death of an individual, and amateur syllabic verse, locating both in the context of professional bardic poetry. The chapter demonstrates how Caitilín Dubh, Fionnghuala Ní Bhriain, and Brighid Fitzgerald engaged with bardic tradition and expressed complex positions in relation to gendered and ethnic identity. It analyses the legitimizing contexts for women's authorship of verse, discussing the more prolific Scottish Gaelic context as an important reference point for the understanding of Irish women's compositions. Finally, the chapter explores Irish noblewomen's patronage of poetry, arguing that this evidence throws light on women's critical engagement with bardic culture.

This introductory chapter explains the theme of this book, which is about the gothic and fantastic writing of Scottish women. The book proposes an earlier date for the fantastic revival and begins its investigation in 1978, the publication date of Emma Tennant's The Bad Sister. It pioneers in-depth investigation of largely neglected contemporary texts including Alice Thompson's Pandora's Box and Ali Smith's Hotel World, and offers new readings of A. L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad and Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum.

This chapter focuses on the topic of witches in contemporary fantastic writings of Scottish women. It analyses Ellen Galford's Queendom Come, Alice Thompson's Pandora's Box and Ali Smith's The Accidental. The chapter suggests that the witch in these works is a simultaneous embodiment of female marginalisation and feminist subversion, and that the dangerous woman characters challenge binary oppositions between gender and the established hierarchical order.

This chapter explores the double motif, a thematic area deployed to express the self/other dichotomy and the interrogation of binary oppositions in the fantastic writings of Scottish women. It offers an interpretation of Alison Fell's The Bad Box, Emma Tennant's The Bad Sister and Sian Hayton's The Governors. The chapter argues that doppelgänger in these works prompted the interrogation of gender categories while exposing the schizoid divisions within the female psyche.

This chapter analyses the issues of quests and other worlds in the contemporary fantastic writings of Scottish women, explaining that magical journeys to other worlds embody the metaphor of border crossing and the overcoming of familiar thresholds to explore the ‘other’. It describes the deconstructive function the journey and the other world perform in relation to stable notions of identity and ontology. The chapter examines the complex trajectories traced by the most eminently fantastic texts of Margaret Elphinstone's The Incomer and Alison Fell's The Mistress of Lilliput.

The expediency of the discourse used by employers, trade unionists and male workers that identified women workers as docile and politically apathetic has been bolstered by a historiography which argues that the nature of women's work between the wars meant that they were unlikely to be politicised by it. Domestic service, and office and retail jobs, the principal occupations of Scottish women, were not noted for their capacity to heighten class consciousness. In contrast to the expansion of blue-collar factory jobs employing men which resulted in greater levelling and possibilities for enhanced class awareness, women's work in domestic service, clerical occupations, and shops was scattered, sidelined and in close proximity to employers. Seemingly, the nature of this work made it subject to paternalistic influences and capable of imbuing women with a false sense of status, which in turn constrained their class awareness. Yet the extent of female activism and the varieties of women's militancy were as diverse as their work experiences. Many women expressed a consciousness of class membership that was shaped by their experiences of work. They responded to the effects of capitalism at the point of production both overtly and covertly using a range of strategies.

The gendered nature of employment and women's experiences of work between the wars remains a relatively neglected field of study, especially in Scotland. Contemporary depictions of working women in the inter-war period often present them as cheap labour and ‘usurpers of men's jobs’, while historical representations of women tend to portray them as embracing a reconstructed domesticity. However, Scottish women's employment patterns, work experiences, trade union membership, industrial activism, and political consciousness in the workplace, although failing to fit within labour historiography's male-centric framework, do nevertheless subvert the stereotypes that inter-war working-class women were politically apathetic or that they had the potential to undermine male employees. What the nature of women's work and trade union organisation does highlight are the considerable obstacles that working women had to overcome to achieve progress and avoid exploitation in the world of work.

This chapter considers the revenant motif in fantastic writings of Scottish women. It explains that this motif serves as the paradoxical site of theoretical discourses about corporeality and ethereality, life and death, and seen and unseen. The chapter offers an interpretation of Elspeth Barker's O Caledonia, A.L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad and Ali Smith's Hotel World, suggesting that the ghost in twentieth-century writings signifies the overcoming of structuralist dualism.

Scotland's inter-war working-class constituency has been identified with a powerful class awareness that was expressed in extreme militancy immediately before, during and in the years after the First World War. Such was the extent of the militancy that it has generated a debate over the country's radical and ‘revolutionary’ potential. However, in Scottish labour historiography that story has been and remains a masculine narrative. This chapter subverts that narrative by highlighting how working-class women's experiences of everyday life politicised them. Women's roles as moral guardians of home, family and community provided a basis for coalitions, especially where economic conditions threatened their identities as good household managers, but they also expressed a class awareness that was interlinked to their gender identities.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the contemporary fantastic writings of Scottish women. The findings reveal the fragility of rigid parameters of thinking and highlight the possible shift to the right in politics across Europe. The analysis of the notions of three kinds of otherness explored in the book also raised further questions about the future of the ‘others’ and the aftermath of postmodernism in a post-feminist, globalised twenty-first century.

The inter-war years were a period of extreme gender antagonism and economic insecurity in Scotland and this influenced working-class women's political identities. However, gender antagonism facilitated, even if only on a temporary basis, a ‘rough kind of feminism’. Although divided by age, religion, status and income, working-class women converged on a range of issues which affected them as a group. They came together to counter the weight of the adverse economic climate, government policies and men's attempts to subordinate them in the workplace, the political arena, the home and in their communities. The formation of women's political identity in Scotland between the wars was a complex process, but it was one in which they were active participants.