Mrs. Oliphant (Margaret)

Jenni Calder

A prolific writer with many novels to her name, Margaret Oliphant could produce her few supernatural tales 'only when they came to me'. And they came with the twilight uncertainties and the philosophical depth of 'The Library Window', or with the extraordinary vision of purgatory imagined as modern city life mixed with metaphysical terror in 'The Land of Darkness' or in A Beleaguered City, her extraordinary short novel of the returning dead.Like the old Scottish ballads where the dead and the living rub shoulders, these remarkable tales are among Oliphant's finest work, mixing the subtlety of Henry James with the uncanny strangeness of George MacDonald or David Lindsay.

A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and the Unseen

Today there are up to 25 million Americans who claim to have Scottish heritage. Many of these people are the descendants of Scots who journeyed to America in the 19th Century, and became true pioneers in the West. These men and women were real cowboys and homesteaders; they were sheriffs and outlaws; they mined gold and built railroads; and they were among the first to conquer the frontier, making lives for themselves in the wild west. Most importantly they became the Scots who helped to shape the United States of America. From the commended to the condemed, the Scots who braved America's frontier territories have made a lasting impact on what is now the world's most powerful country. This is an accurate and fascinating depiction of these people and their stories, giving real insight into the lives of the frontier Scots.

Frontier Scots

'This book is a personal journey – an eccentric odyssey – exploring aspects of past and present, people and places. It is an evocation rather than a history.' A city of fascinating unpredictability is how Jenni Calder describes Edinburgh. In an eccentric odyssey that is equally fascinating and unpredictable, she discovers the essence of the city beyond the iconic centre. With a passionate sense of place, she evokes personal experience alongside vivid accounts of Edinburgh given by others. In the Grassmarket, she recalls Sir Walter Scott's dramatisations of riot and public execution. On Blackford Hill, she takes pleasure in the account given by the 'Silent Traveller' Chiang Yee of walking backwards to the summit. Crossing the Dean Bridge brings to mind Naomi Mitchison's imagined descent into the vertiginous Dean Gorge. Jenni Calder's journeys through this most 'walkable' of cities brings a new appreciation of Edinburgh into being.

An Eccentric Odyssey

Essence of Edinburgh

The map of the United States is peppered with Scottish place-names and America's telephone directories are filled with surnames illustrating Scottish ancestry. Increasingly, Americans of Scottish extraction are visiting Scotland in search of their family history. All over Scotland and the United States there are clues to the Scottish-American relationship, the legacy of centuries of trade and communication as well as that of departure and heritage. The experiences of Scottish settlers in the United States varied enormously, as did their attitudes to the lifestyles that they left behind and those that they began anew once they arrived in North America. Scots in the USA discusses why they left Scotland, where they went once they reached the United States, and what they did when they got there.... a valuable readable and illuminating addition to a burgeoning literature... should be required reading on the flight to New York by all those on the Tartan Week trail. - Alan Taylor, Sunday Herald

Scots in the USA

Scottish Adventure and Achievement

The Enterprising Scot

Huxley: Brave New World and Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Robert Louis Stevenson

Poems for children, ballards for his friends in the South Seas, poetic tales of Scotland - a selection of the poetry Stevenson wrote all his life.

Stevenson: Everyman's Poetry

And Other Stories

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

How the American wilderness shaped Scottish experience, imagination and identity. How is the Scottish imagination shaped by its emigre experience with wilderness and the extreme? Drawing on journals, emigrant guides, memoirs, letters, poetry and fiction, this book examines patterns of survival, defeat, adaptation and response in North America's harshest landscapes. Most Scots who crossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encountered the practical, moral and cultural challenges of the wilderness, with its many tensions and contradictions. Jenni Calder explores the effect of these experiences on the Scots imagination. Associated with displacement and disappearance, the 'wilderness' was also a source of adventure and redemption, of exploitation and spiritual regeneration, of freedom and restriction. An arena of greed, cruelty and cannibalism, of courage, generosity and mutual understanding, it brought out the best and the worst of humanity. Did the Scots who emigrated exchange one extreme for another, or did they discover a new idea of identity, freedom and landscape?

Scots and the North American Wilderness

Lost in the Backwoods

Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction

Huxley and Orwell, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty Four

The map of the United States is peppered with Scottish place-names and America's telephone directories are filled with surnames illustrating Scottish ancestry. For the 27 million Americans with Scottish roots, it should come of no surprise that their ancestors helped shape American history from its beginnings. Jenni Calder's Scots in the USA reminds of us of the enormous role played by Scots in the foundation and creation of America, and provides new insight into Scottish-American history.

Jenni Daiches

Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four

‘It is always a bore being ahead of one’s time.’ Naomi Mitchison was a novelist, socialist, feminist and tireless campaigner for sexual freedom. She lived through the entire twentieth century and wrote more than seventy books. Her political activism took her from the Soviet Union to her adopted Botswana as a champion of liberty and equality. The Burning Glass draws a fascinating portrait of a truly inspiring life.

The Life of Naomi Mitchison

The Burning Glass

Naomi Mitchison was a novelist, socialist, feminist and tireless campaigner for sexual freedom. She lived through the entire twentieth century and wrote more than seventy books. Her political activism took her from the Soviet Union to her adopted Botswana as a champion of liberty and equality. The Burning Glass draws a fascinating portrait of a truly inspiring life.

Jenni Calder

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