Giving voice to the forgotten women of Scotland's dark history
How new wave of historical fiction has lessons for us all today
A new wave of Scottish historical fiction is giving a voice to ‘ordinary’ Scottish women from across centuries and circumstance but united by one thing – how overlooked their interests, work, lives and concerns have been.
At a time when there’s been increasing calls for justice for people who were persecuted as witches, through campaigns such as Witches of Scotland, historical fiction potentially provides another avenue of recognition for women who still continue to be overlooked in mainstream historical narratives.
As Jenni Fagan, award-winning author of Hex and Luckenbooth explains, “I believe a great many women never see justice and literature cannot go back and change that. What it can do is centre the stories of those who were not allowed to have a voice, or accurate telling of their own truths at the time.”
Growing up and going to school in Musselburgh and Edinburgh as I did, the one Scottish woman who came up again and again in history lessons was Mary Queen of Scots. As fascinating and complex as her character and story are, I learned very little about any other women and next to nothing about any women who weren’t members of the aristocracy. It wasn’t until I went to university that I learned that Mary’s son, James VI and I, had an intense personal interest in witches and witchcraft – an obsession that would lead to the murder of hundreds of innocent Scottish women whose lives I never learned about at school.
Once I found out that North Berwick - a place where I spent sunny days as a child and teenager – had a horrifying history of witch trials with over 70 people being implicated in 1590, I knew I had to find out more. I discovered a history of power, misogyny and class that inspired a historical subplot about witch trials in my debut novel, These Mortal Bodies.
Although my book is largely contemporary and set in a modern-day university, drawing on the history I was deprived of at school felt like a way to give voice to characters whose own voices have been (sometimes literally) drowned out.
In Hex Fagan fictionalises the real historical figure of Geillis Duncan, a young woman who was a maid in Tranent, and who was tortured and executed as a witch in 1591 after being accused by her employer. Fagan points out that, “To speak out against the witch trials would not have been possible to do in the way we can now, with the wider vision of history and the distancing quality of time and changes in our legal system, to allow such an endeavour far more clarity.”
