At the close of Willa Muir's Imagined Corners (1931) the novel's two protagonists, both named Elizabeth Shand, escape the confines of the small northeast town of Calderwick for Europe. If Calderwick is where Lizzie Shand has been able to discover ‘her central, dispassionate, impregnable self’ (Muir 1987: 280), it is also a place that is hostile to the individual; only in Europe, Muir suggests, can one overcome the natural hostility to free thinking found in Scottish towns. The tension between European and Scottish life appears in many other texts by Scottish women writers over the twentieth century, from Catherine Carswell's The Camomile (1922) to Janice Galloway's Foreign Parts (1994). More recent texts, however, have stressed regional as well as national divisions, and suggest a new perspective can be found simply by shifting setting. In thematically diverse twenty-first-century novels ranging from Laura Marney's comic No Wonder I Take a Drink (2004) to Jenni Fagan's dystopian The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016), characters turn to remote highland and island communities as places of remove and renewal. In both novels, as well as those discussed below, remote communities not only prove to be more complex than the characters sometimes imagine, but also are used to illustrate the failure of dominant epistemological and geographical categories.

Linda Cracknell's Call of the Undertow (2013) and Sarah Moss's Night Waking (2011), for instance, feature a cartographer and historian, respectively, who leave the structured environment of Oxford for remote Scottish communities. The two novels share a geographic focus on isolated, rural landscapes, a thematic focus on motherhood and loss, and a generic combination of conventional realism and the fantastic, making use of Gothic tropes. They also interrogate ideas of disciplinary expertise: the protagonists come to understand the land and people around them through their academic specialisms, but also discover the limits of such discourses. Likewise, in crime novels such as Karen Campbell's Rise (2015) and Denise Mina's Blood Salt Water (2015), the apparent idyll of remote communities is shown to be ultimately unstable as larger political and social forces intervene in characters’ lives.