Ostensibly the most privileged of the diarists considered in this book, Violet Dickinson had one of the most difficult lives. She had a fraught, distant relationship with her mother, her often-absent art dealer father played an ambivalent role in her life, and for many years the family had no permanent home. As a young woman, underneath the superficial, nouveau-riche assurance, Dickinson was deeply uncertain of her direction in life. She fled her high-society milieu for the safety of an East Kent smallholding, in company with her younger brother Cedric. Rural self-sufficiency and craftwork appears to have provided a measure of stability, fulfilment and peace of mind for Dickinson. However, her successive moves to smallholdings in Sussex and then Somerset were indicative of continuing emotional tensions (some linked to her closet lesbianism), and her efforts to construct a new ‘family’ about her in these secluded rural settings were only partially successful.

CH 1: Margaret Oliphant, one of the first Scotswomen to make a living as a professional writer, looked to Walter Scott to legitimate her pragmatic understandings of authorship as a skilled trade and literature as a form of entertainment rather than a source of spiritual truths. In her autobiography and her novels, Oliphant drew on Scott’s example to explore the inverse relationship between literature’s aesthetic and economic value. Both her sentimental Scottish romances and her masterfully ironic Chronicles of Carlingford declare the superiority of skilled craftmanship to inspired genius as source of literary and artistic production. The Chronicles of Carlingford became a touchstone for later Scottish women writers by articulating an aesthetics of the ordinary and affirming the vast importance that seemingly mundane events occupy in the lives of most people. But it was in her romances that Oliphant defined her own relationship to Scottish literary tradition by feminizing the chivalric adventures of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels.