Edinburgh Napier University

  This thesis provides a detailed study of the work of three Scottish women writers of the interwar period (Willa Muir, Lorna Moon, and Nan Shepherd) to review their individual responses to one critical aspect of rural modernity: widespread watchfulness. The analysis in this thesis combines, for the first time, a rural approach to theories of modernity and watchfulness and, using the metaphor of the rural panopticon, shows that they are interlinked and that women are disproportionately impacted by pressures to adhere to societal rules.

Scholarship which reviews the contribution of Scottish women writers to the field of rural modernity remains in need of further exploration. To address this gap, this thesis investigates the responses of Muir, Moon, and Shepherd to rural modernity and watchfulness. Muir's writing depicts semi-rural spaces which are negatively impacted by a patriarchal Presbyterianism, and positions departure as the most likely means by which to access the opportunities offered by modernity. Moon mocks traditions of grief and the women who adhere to them and adopts ridicule and parody as a protective tool. Shepherd’s fiction highlights the tensions between rural and urban spaces and the pressures of watchfulness, and the thesis then examines Shepherd as a rural-flâneur in her non-fiction, who reclaims and celebrates the rural space.

The thesis concludes that these three interwar writers each provide different responses to the pressures of rural modernity and watchfulness, and each seeks strategies for empowerment. Furthermore, the thesis contextualises the writing of these authors in broader scholarship and debates in Scottish literary modernism, feminism, Presbyterianism, and grief studies. Through explicitly considering the crucial insights offered by these authors, this thesis makes a significant contribution to existing scholarship by further refining what is understood of Scottish literary modernism, firmly establishing its relationship with watchfulness, and emphasising the nuanced contributions of women writers.