Willa Muir's autobiography is an elusive text; ostensibly it was never actually written, but that need be no deterrent to making it the starting point of this examination of self, gender and society in her work. On the contrary, the location of autobiography as a hidden subtext, both in the novels and in the late works Belonging and Living with Ballads, is exemplary of Muir's analysis of marginality and identity.

It seems appropriate to begin with two autobiographical incidents embedded in the two non-fiction texts, even though these books, appearing at the end of her writing career, might not seem at first to be the obvious place to start. Lumir Soukup describes Muir's struggle to sustain her output at this late stage, and is aware of the limitations of time and old age:

Belonging (1968) is explicitly a memoir of Edwin; Living with Ballads (1965), a book Edwin was commissioned to write, and that Willa wrote after his death, is an examination of the significance of the ballad as expression of a culture and a society. Both books fulfil their stated purpose more than adequately. They also engage with that major theme in all Muir's writing; the issue of identity in relation to belonging. Belonging is represented in both, as I hope to show, in terms of an Edenic state of both unity of self and union with what Muir calls ‘the universe’; lapse from this state of belonging is marked by a sense of dislocation, and of entrapment in a maze of misconceptions and dead ends.

Both Edenic and labyrinthine images will be familiar to anyone who knows the poetry of Edwin Muir. A study of either Willa or Edwin Muir constantly uncovers evidence of a fruitful exchange of not only the ideas that belong in both Muirs’ construct of the conscious world, but also the images that reflect the unconscious.