Some contemporary Scottish women writers of fiction are living in England, and in several cases they have also been educated in England, so that their Scottishness may not be immediately apparent. Nevertheless Emma Tennant, Alison Fell Shena Mackay, Sara Maitland and Candia Me William were all bom either in Scotland or into a Scottish family, have all spent at least a part of their childhood in Scotland, and their work has, in varying degrees, a Scottish dimension. Scotland provides Tennant, Fell and McWilliam with a significant body of material for their writing, and Mackay and Maitland make occasional use of Scottish material. All of them carry with them some sense of their Scottish origins. Their family backgrounds differ: Tennant, Maitland and McWilliam, all privately educated at English schools, have had access to socially privileged circles, whereas Fell positions herself firmly as a woman with Scottish working-class origins.

Emma Tennant

Emma Tennant, bom in 1937, is the daughter of the 2nd Baron Glenconner and Lady Glenconner, but unusually for a woman from such a background she has become a writer of fiction which is radical in its treatment of class and sexual politics. Her output is prolific. Her first novel, which appeared in 1964 under the name Catherine Aydy, was unfavourably received, and after that she published no fiction for nine years, but since The Time of the Crack (1973) she has produced more than a dozen novels. She was also influential as the founding editor, from 1975 to 1978, of the innovative literary magazine Bananas. She has been general editor since 1985 of Viking's series Lives of Modern Women. She herself classifies her fiction in three categories. There are comic satirical fantasies, such as The Time of the Cracky The Last of the Country House Murders (1974), and Hotel de Dream (1976), which offer a critique of various aspects of modem society. Another group of novels, notably Wild Nights (1979) and Alice Fell (1980), depend largely on Tennant's poetic evocation of atmosphere, in treatment of subjects such as childhood and adolescence. The third and largest category, not in itself homogeneous, is a body of feminist writing.