The Selected Stories

Ann Scott-Moncrieff was a highly regarded writer and poet of the cultural revival of Scottish literature in the inter-war period that is often called the second Renaissance. The author of the internationally popular tales for children Aboard the Bulger (1935), The White Drake and Other Tales (1936), and Auntie Robbo (1941), Scott-Moncrieff was no peripheral figure in the Scottish literary scene of the 1930s and was seen as more than ‘just’ a children’s writer in her time. She and her husband George Scott-Moncrieff moved in circles of literary nationalism and Catholicism – the religion to which they (alongside several of their contemporaries) converted. Ann Scott-Moncrieff’s short stories traverse wide ground and are full of rich reflection about women’s lives, children’s interior worlds, class, the condition of Scotland in the inter-war years, Scottish Church history, and rural life. And while there is very little in the way of overtly Catholic material in these stories, they are undoubtedly the work of a writer of the Catholic literary imagination. Mediation, grace, tradition and revelation are all observable strands which are woven carefully throughout these beautifully crafted works. The stories themselves give voice to Scotland’s girls, spinsters, young women and wives in the early decades of the twentieth century. They are at different times wry, ironical, hilarious, tragic, and full of feeling. But despite being a lively poetic presence with a strong, individual voice, Ann Scott-Moncrieff’s work for adults has fallen out of print and (until now) her short fiction has never been anthologized, meaning that its significance has gone largely unrecognized by contemporary critics and literary historians, and a new generation of readers has been denied the pleasure of reading her profound and witty work. This collection of her short fiction, brought to a new generation of readers, shows her to be a deft, lively, and gifted Catholic woman writer, whose work is deserving of renewed critical attention and re-evaluation.