CH 5: The novels of O. Douglas (Anna Buchan) have been overlooked by scholars because of their apparent artlessness and simplicity. By contrast, those of her contemporary Catherine Carswell are celebrated as examples of Scottish literary modernism. Yet Douglas’s and Carswell’s novels are not in fact as different as their disparate reception might lead us to expect. They challenge Free Church ambivalence toward the indulgence of aesthetic pleasure by representing everyday beauty as a source of happiness and of moral and intellectual amelioration. When Douglas’s characters learn to appreciate and create instances of everyday beauty, they become reconciled to the ordinariness of middle-class, evangelical Scottish society, which they realize is not so ordinary after all. In Carswell’s novels, the appreciation of everyday beauty becomes the modernist epiphany, a moment in which the everyday is transformed and the confines of middle-class, evangelical Scottish society are left behind. Reading Carswell’s novels together with Douglas’s suggests that it is perhaps more useful to conceive of the middlebrow and modernism, or popular literature and high art, as a continuum than as an opposition.