‘Who were they?’: Recovering Jessie Annie Anderson as a Case Study of the Scottish Women Poets in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Northern Numbers (1920–22)

Abstract

Of the fourteen women included in Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry anthology, Northern Numbers (1920–22), only four are relatively well known in the reading public’s consciousness and academic scholarship. As for the rest, very little information has been gathered. This essay presents a case study of one of the women in Northern Numbers, Jessie Annie Anderson (1861–1931), who was a prodigious and eclectic working-class poet, writer, magazine editor, and cultural revivalist. Although considered on the fringes of the Scottish Literary Revival, Anderson’s career complicates our understanding of revival as a poet who straddled the rise of the popular penny press in Scotland in the 1880s and the emergence of the Scottish Literary Revival in the 1920s. This essay brings together Anderson’s life, letters, and work in conversation for the first time and re-evaluates her as part of the generation of Scottish women writers for whom literature was a source of income in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

From 1920 to 1922, Hugh MacDiarmid produced three volumes of Scottish poetry entitled Northern Numbers, Being Representative Selections from Certain Living Scottish Poets. Many of the poets in Northern Numbers are familiar names in the lexicon of the Scottish Literary Revival that gathered speed in the 1920s, including Charles Murray, Neil Munro, Roderick Watson Kerr, and, of course, the editor himself, C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid).¹ In 2005, Alan Riach emphasised the editorial efforts of MacDiarmid’s Northern Numbers in promoting Scottish women’s writing, saying that ‘No editor of Scottish poetry before or since has done as much as Grieve/MacDiarmid to insist that the voices of women should be heard to represent the nation’.²

Whilst MacDiarmid’s inclusion of Scottish women in Northern Numbers is notable – particularly the third volume which includes ten women – we know very little about them. The best known and most researched are Violet Jacob, Helen B. Cruickshank, Mary Symon, and Isobel Wylie Hutchison, who are all included in the first two volumes. Therefore, out of a total of fourteen women published across the three volumes of Northern Numbers there are ten relatively unknown and under-researched names.³ If MacDiarmid considered these women representative of a new collection of Scottish poetry at the outset of the Scottish Literary Revival, and the Scottish Renaissance, why are they not better known? As Riach asks, ‘Who were they?’⁴

This question is as prescient now as it was in the 1990s and 2000s when a string of publications emerged that re-focused attention in Scottish literary scholarship towards women’s writing.⁵ These collections were primarily concerned with recovering Scottish women writers’ biographies and bibliographies and demonstrated that Scottish women’s writing was as significant and textually rich as its dominant male counterpart. Since then, Glenda Norquay’s The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing (2012) has encouraged a reconceptualisation of the literary paradigms of women’s writing in Scotland by considering genre, issues of critical neglect, and questions of readership.⁶ As she notes, the process of recovery can only go so far: previous collections that relied on the ‘show and tell approach’ were often limited in their critical examinations, and anthologies or compilations of women’s writing both overlook the lived experiences of women and suggest a static or fixed editorial determination of what was considered a writer’s best or most notable work.⁷ Further, the trend towards republication, recently experienced with the re-emergence in print of Nan Shepherd’s novels, can have a transient impact on a writer’s recovery in the reading public’s consciousness. As Katherine Gordon notes, although Scottish women writers, like those included in Northern Numbers, were ‘once known and read’, they have ‘slipped away, out of print, out of sight, lost’ and ‘republication of their work is not enough; it must be considered as part of a wider literary tradition’.⁸

This essay presents a case study of recovery of one of the women included in Northern Numbers, Jessie Annie Anderson (1861–1931). Anderson belongs to the second generation of professional Scottish women writers identified by Juliet Shields, those born after c. 1860 for whom literature was a vocation and a source of income.⁹ In this generational sphere, Anderson occupies complicated territory; on the one hand, she was a typical minor poet of the late-Victorian era who published elegies and standard verse on religion, nature, time, and the seasons. On the other hand, her literary career extends far beyond this: she was a biographer, short story writer, magazine editor, peace activist, and occultist. Although a correspondent with some of its associated figures – including MacDiarmid – Anderson was not considered a part of the general tide of creative work in the early twentieth century known as the Scottish Literary Revival, nor was she associated with the Scottish Renaissance spearheaded by MacDiarmid. Nevertheless, she lived to see these movements and continued to publish throughout them and, as her correspondence with the Scottish poet, artist, and revivalist sculptor James Pittendrigh Macgillivray reveals, she held firm opinions about their associated literati. She was also a paraplegic and was defined by this disability in biographical accounts. This essay brings together Anderson’s life, letters, and career in conversation for the first time and assesses her as a poet sustained by the Scottish periodical press but hitherto overlooked in discussions of the cultural and literary revival that generated momentum throughout the 1920s in Scotland. In doing so, it adds to scholarly efforts that re-evaluate the generation of Scottish women writers who were active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hugh macdiarmid and the ‘ladies’ choir’ of scotland

Northern Numbers was one of the first published works in which Hugh MacDiarmid openly emphasised the contribution of women to Scottish literature at the outset of the 1920s. It was a subject he returned to often; in issues of Scottish Chapbook (1922–23) and Northern Review (1924), in essays published as Contemporary Scottish Studies (1926), and in his anthology Living Scottish Poets (1931). Northern Numbers has been characterised as ‘asserting the equal value and validity of the literary and poetic expression of the experience of women with that of men’.¹⁰ Whilst MacDiarmid’s promotion of Scottish women in Northern Numbers was commendable in bringing women’s writing into the fold of twentieth-century Scottish literature, he was characteristically contradictory in doing so. In Contemporary Scottish Studies (published three years after the last volume of Northern Numbers) he opens his discussion of Muriel Stuart – whom he considered ‘the greatest woman-poet Scotland has so far produced’¹¹ – with the following statement:

There is a wide-spread idea that Scotland has been especially rich in songstresses. This is not so: and those we have had have been, as in other countries, almost without exception definitely inferior in accomplishment and not markedly different in tendency to the fourth or fifth rank of their brother-poets. Few have risen above the merest mediocrity at all: and those who have generally by only one poem or at most two or three poems. The total output of our poetesses of any quality at all has been exceedingly slight.¹²

Indeed, MacDiarmid’s praise of Scottish women writers is predominantly critical. When discussing Jessie Annie Anderson, he states that ‘scarcely anywhere does she maintain for a whole verse – let alone a complete poem’, and ‘It is a great pity that with her big heart and many gifts she lacks that faculty of achieving significant form, in the absence of which all the rest is so largely wasted’.¹³ Peppered amongst these is genuine approval – primarily directed at Violet Jacob, Muriel Stuart, and Rachel Annand Taylor – as is an acknowledgment of the chauvinistic social and publishing networks which neglect and marginalise women’s writing. Nevertheless, he makes similar lamentations about twenty-one Scottish women writers and poets, such as ‘the content of her work is too often cliché and commonplace’.¹⁴ Although Northern Numbers and Contemporary Scottish Studies were published in different years and serve different purposes – one as a showcase of Scottish poetry produced by 1922, the other an analysis of Scottish literature in the years that followed – the essays that are collected in Contemporary Scottish Studies were written prior to 1926 and so MacDiarmid’s published commentary on his female counterparts in this text is still relevant to the discussion of the women writers who feature in Northern Numbers.

Despite MacDiarmid’s desire that Northern Numbers be considered as ‘an annual of new Scottish poetry rather than as an anthology’,¹⁵ without the context (and subtext) of Contemporary Scottish Studies, the impact of Northern Numbers is limited to that of an anthology and has much in common with poetry anthologies that proliferated in late-Victorian Scotland, such as David Herschell Edwards’s Modern Scottish Poets (1880–97), Alexander G. Murdoch’s The Scottish Poets Recent and Living (1883), and Alan Reid’s The Bards of Angus and the Mearns (1897).¹⁶ Kirstie Blair has described these anthologies as ‘both backward and forward-thinking’ in their ability to preserve and promote poetry,¹⁷ and the same can be said of Northern Numbers which contrasts newly published poets against more established names.¹⁸ In doing so, there is far more continuity between poets of the late-Victorian era and those associated with Scottish poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century. Jessie Annie Anderson is an example of this: she is the only poet of the 156 women included in Modern Scottish Poets to appear in Northern Numbers.¹⁹ Ultimately, whilst acknowledging the restrictive publication format of Northern Numbers, MacDiarmid’s collection exemplifies the limitations of annuals, anthologies, compilations, and edited miscellanies in the context of the recovery of women’s writing. By providing no context to the poets in Northern Numbers (including the men), their contributions to Scottish literature are easily overlooked and their wider interests and literary activities are essentially overshadowed by the tastes and opinions of MacDiarmid.

The crux of MacDiarmid’s criticism towards the women in Northern Numbers is about mediocrity, specifically, that Scottish women writers and poets were ‘competent versifiers who seldom rise above “magazine verse” level’.²⁰ The mention of magazines is significant because the Scottish periodical press was dominated by poetry in the 1870 to 1920 period.²¹ All of the women in Northern Numbers published in newspapers, magazines and periodicals prior to 1920: poems by Helen B. Cruickshank and Christine Orr in Northern Numbers had previously been published in The Poetry Review, Chambers’s Journal, and Punch, and Jessie Annie Anderson’s poem ‘El Dorado’ was published in the Banffshire Herald in 1907.²² This is not to say that women only (or predominantly) published in the periodical press – a number of the poems by men in Northern Numbers were also republished from magazines and periodicals – nevertheless, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, there was a significant feminisation of the Scottish periodical press from the 1880s that attracted a substantial number of the women writers and poets under consideration here and on which their careers were heavily reliant.²³

Magazines, periodicals and newspapers have proven to be an important source for the continued recovery of Scottish women writers. From Annie S. Swan to Jessie Kerr Lawson (both major serial novelists for the People’s Friend), recent insights have revealed the dependence of women writers on the magazine industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁴ Likewise, the recovery of Jessie Annie Anderson is centred in the magazines, newspapers, and periodicals that she contributed to, and extends beyond her inclusion in edited collections or anthologies.²⁵ Indeed, it is in Scottish literary magazines of the 1960s–90s that we find concerted efforts to recover and republish Scottish women’s writing, such as Scottish Women’s Liberation Journal (1977–78), Msprint (1978–81), Radical Scotland (1982–91), Catalyst (1967–74), and Cencrastus (1979–2006), but most notably in Chapman (1970–2009) under the editor-ship of Joy Hendry, which dedicated a double issue in August 1980 to Scottish women’s contributions to culture and the arts, entitled ‘Woven by Women’.²⁶

While earlier calls to place Scottish women’s writing in a national literary tradition were immensely useful, a more pressing task is placing these women’s lives and their literary outputs alongside one another. How did these women form their relationship with literature? Where were they educated? Which writers or poets did they seek to emulate or complement? Who did they correspond or collaborate with? What commonalities can we find amongst their work? In seeking answers to these questions, we are encouraged to revaluate their work and recover poems or poetry volumes that are worth reading again. When this revaluation is coupled with a consideration of how women writers might be situated within wider literary patterns as a cohort, we are rewarded with a much richer picture of the ‘proto-feminism of the younger generation’ of Scottish women poets.²⁷

Jessie annie anderson as cultural revivalist

Jessie was born on Christmas Eve in 1861 in Ellon, a town about twenty miles from Aberdeen. Her father, Peter Anderson, was a stone cutter who progressed to a master stonemason.²⁸ The working-class family was a large one: between 1861 and 1880, Jessie’s mother, Jane Anderson (née McDonald), gave birth to eleven children, including a set of twins.²⁹ Jessie was the eldest, and soon after her birth the Andersons moved from Ellon to Aberdeen and lived at several addresses on Holburn Street. In the winter of 1871, at ten years old, Jessie fell on ice whilst walking to school and was left paralysed from the waist down and largely housebound.³⁰ Her mother continued her education at home, and Jessie took an interest in literature, particularly poetry, and began writing verses at the age of twelve.³¹ For the rest of her life, she lived in Aberdeen and Ellon and was recorded in the census as an ‘Authoress (Working on Own Account)’.³²

Jessie’s coming of age coincided with that of the popular penny press in Scotland which became the launchpad for the careers of aspiring Scottish poets and writers after 1860.³³ As Kirstie Blair sets out in her study of the People’s Journal, local newspapers and magazines were crucial to the introduction of working-class poets to professional publishing and, very often, this was through cash-prize literary competitions.³⁴ In 1883 and 1884, Jessie won £1 in the People’s Journal’s annual Christmas competition and subsequently won various prizes for poetry and short stories in competitions organised by newspapers, such as the Aberdeen Free Press.³⁵ In an interview with Helen Greig Souter, a Dundee-born journalist for John Leng’s newspapers under the pseudonyms ‘Aunt Kate’ and ‘Helen’, Jessie reflected on the encouragement she received from entering the People’s Journal’s competitions as an unknown writer:

My first story appeared in the Christmas Number of the People’s Journal for 1883. I sent it in more to see where I would stand than in expectation of a prize, and I kept it quite a secret, so that my friends knew nothing of it until my name appeared in the pages. Year after year I competed and gained another third, a second, and a first prize, and then I left off. Apropos of that first story, I used then to write when the household had gone to bed, and I, too, was supposed to be sleeping, but I kept a surreptitious stock of candles and matches.³⁶

From 1880 there were far more women prize-winners in the People’s Journal competitions. In 1885, Jessie Patrick Findlay and Agnes S. Falconer (a Northern Numbers poet), who were both well-known poets in their hometowns of Kirkcaldy and Duns respectively, won £1 in the newspaper’s Christmas competition on the theme of industrial verse.³⁷ Annie S. Swan also published in the People’s Journal prior to her career as a novelist: in 1879 she won £1 for a short story entitled ‘Davie’. Her remuneration was boosted to £3 in January 1880 when it was discovered that the winner of the first prize story had ‘not complied with the conditions of the competition’ and her story was deemed to be ‘the most worthy of occupying the second place’.³⁸ Similarly, Christmas issues produced by newspapers or magazines were a significant site for the publication of women after 1880. In 1907, the Weekly News’s Christmas annual included Annie S. Swan’s sister Maggie Swan, Agnes S. Falconer and her sister Mary W. M. Falconer, as well as Jessie Annie Anderson.³⁹

The proliferation of women in the pages of the People’s Journal may have been encouraged by the newspaper’s ‘Juvenile Competition’, a letter-writing competition that started in 1879 and which had separate categories for girls and boys. As Lois Burke has demonstrated, girls’ writing in the late nineteenth century was heavily inspired by magazine culture and the periodical press and, in many cases, girls who engaged with magazine culture went on to have successful literary careers, including Christine Orr who created the manuscript magazine Talks and Tales (1911–16) as a teenager in Edinburgh.⁴⁰ For young women like Jessie Annie Anderson, the reinforcement of a gendered space in the penny press was likely an encouragement for her literary aspirations and led to a consistent career of publishing in the press.⁴¹ As Shields sets out, the women writers who preceded Anderson were predominantly middle-class women who pursued literature through the financial support of family or a spouse.⁴² For working-class and lower-middle-class women, newspaper literary competitions were essential in encouraging a space for their literary productions in the mainstream press (inevitably predicated by certain editorial preferences and priorities) beyond popular women’s magazines and periodicals which were predominantly for middle-class women in the late nineteenth century.

Anderson typifies many of the biographical characteristics of minor Scottish poets in the late-Victorian era: she was working-class, mainly self-educated, and like other working- and lower-middle-class poets, reliant on the periodical press.⁴³ Similarly, her verse is on standard Victorian themes, such as nature, children, and Robert Burns.⁴⁴ That being said, of her thirteen volumes of poetry and countless more poems published across the press, there is much thematic ground to cover. Indeed, although Scottish women poets at the turn of the twentieth century used traditional elements in their work, their verse was ‘characterised by tremendous thematic and stylistic diversity’.⁴⁵ Jessie is certainly included in this analysis. Broadly construed, her poetry explores the metaphysical world to reflect religion, spiritualism, mysticism and the occult. This was noted by Pittendrigh Macgillivray in the introduction to his correspondence with Jessie. Although the two never met in person, over the course of their correspondence, he described her as having ‘a faculty of psychic perception such as might be termed “second sight” ’.⁴⁶

Jessie’s interest in the metaphysical world is prominent in her contributions to the Banffshire Herald, a paper which regularly published her work alongside her friend and fellow poet, Alexander J. Grant. In ‘A Pool’, we see Jessie question the connection between water and truthfulness:

Serene beneath the changeful skiesA deep wide pool of water lies;And souls draw near, but each alone,And drop their secrets, one by oneNo others know they drop thereinHope, joy, and sorrow, aye, and sin;Alike o’er happiness and woesThe secret-keeping waters close.⁴⁷

For the most part, her exploration of otherworldliness and metaphysical landscapes is a vehicle through which she emphasises her Christian faith. For instance, in ‘The Untrodden Land’ – a poem about heaven – she considers the possibility that faithful Christians may, after all, be turned away from the afterlife.⁴⁸ Yet despite this uncertainty, she concludes that

at the last we shall enter thereWe trust by our faith in God;And of all that our souls desire and dream,That land is the fair abode.⁴⁹

Several of Jessie’s poems are imbued with religious imagery, such as ‘Christmas Angels’ published in The Queen in 1907.⁵⁰ Similarly, her work reflects an interest in the history of Christianity in Scotland, specifically, the Covenanting period which was a fashionable subject of interest in literature, historiography, and civic memorialisation in nineteenth-century Scotland.⁵¹

From November 1894 to April 1895, Jessie published eleven poems under the title ‘Lyrical Legends’ in the Dundee Evening Telegraph that verge on the supernatural. Most of these poems are included in Jessie’s volume Legends and Ballads of Women (1904). Ostensibly, the poems are fantastical tales of morality that feature characters such as an imprisoned troll, a medieval queen, and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Again, Christianity is present, but explored through mystical settings and subjects. In ‘Rainbow-Land’, Jessie uses a mythical fable about an Icelandic alternative to heaven to underscore her belief in a Christian afterlife:

There is, sayeth Iceland story,A land whereto is givenAll rainbows that have facedFrom out our earthly heaven;But, oh! fair dreams of Rainbow-Land,Far rather would I seeThe white, unbroken Light of GodWhereby all rainbows be.⁵²

Her poetry on occultism, mysticism, and spirituality is more pronounced after 1900, when she published in the Occult Review and The Mystic.⁵³ Though she does not reflect on who or what encouraged her interest in the occult, there was a lively occult revival in fin-de-siècle Scotland that involved several cultural revivalists,⁵⁴ including literary figures, such as John Crichton-Stuart, third Marquess of Bute and proprietor of the Scottish Review (1882–1900), who believed that second sight was a national attribute and a distinct marker of Scottish national identity.⁵⁵ Following Shaw’s analysis of the cultural revival, Jessie was most certainly a fin-de-siècle cultural revivalist – for example, in her correspondence with Pittendrigh Macgillivray, they discuss Japanese and Chinese literature, neo-Jacobitism, and Celtic history.

For Jessie, it appears that her interest in the occult was connected to her Christian faith. Jessie was brought up in the Church of Scotland – her father ran a Mission Bible Class – and she was sympathetic to, if not a member of, the United Presbyterian Church in 1897.⁵⁶ However, in a letter to Pittendrigh Macgillivray she reveals that she was a convert to Catholicism and one of only two Catholics living in Ellon in 1924.⁵⁷ Like other Scottish revivalists who had converted to Catholicism, Jessie’s faith did not preclude her interests in the occult.⁵⁸ Jessie explained that ‘a sense of God is like a sense of the Starry Systems – above, around, and beyond all that man has stammered into all the creeds’.⁵⁹

Her conversion to Catholicism aligns with the neo-Catholic movement of the early twentieth century that harkened back to pre-Reformation Scotland and offered revivalists ‘help to unify and distinguish the national community’.⁶⁰ Jessie described that in her Scots verse, ‘Catholic allusions rise easily into it, as if here also I remembered from far back days of the Celtic Faith’.⁶¹ Here, Jessie echoes MacDiarmid’s thinking about neo-Catholicism as ‘a means to save Scotland’s soul’.⁶² She explained that ‘I think that the finest spiritual elements in Scotland – Celtic Scotland – went under when the Celtic Church did’.⁶³ MacDiarmid included her poetry on Catholicism in the Scottish Chapbook, such as ‘Prayer to the Sacred Heart’ and ‘Marie Reparatrice’, which references the Sisters of Mary Reparatrix, a religious order of women in France.⁶⁴ Jessie was also interested in Mary Queen of Scots and explained to Pittendrigh Macgillivray that she saw Mary’s oxymoronic ‘Puritan and Catholic tendencies’ in her own personality.⁶⁵

Though it is unclear when Jessie converted to Catholicism, her conversion may, like MacDiarmid’s interest in neo-Catholicism, have been inspired by the trauma of the First World War and its after-effects. Jessie was deeply impacted by the war: she lost a brother and a nephew at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917,⁶⁶ and a close friend who ‘Died of over-work after the War just when she thought the worst of the tug was over’.⁶⁷ Like her contemporaries in Northern Numbers, Jessie was one of many women who published poetry about the First World War, reflecting a combination of enthusiasm for wartime benevolence and deep sorrow at the tragedy and violence of the conflict.⁶⁸ For instance, her poem, ‘For a Horse Flag Day’, was included in a Blue Cross publication to raise money for war horses,⁶⁹ whilst ‘The Wasteage of War’ was a critical comment on the impact of the war on ordinary women.⁷⁰ Another poem, ‘Pray For Our Dead’, was so well received by readers of the Graphic that it was reprinted and available to buy from Jessie at one shilling per dozen copies.⁷¹ Notably, ‘Pray For Our Dead’ was also reprinted in the Bush Brother. A Quarterly Paper Conducted by Members of the Brotherhood of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic magazine published in Dubbo, New South Wales, and another war poem was published in The Cross, a monthly magazine conducted by the Passionist Fathers in Dublin.⁷² Overall, the First World War seems to have enriched Jessie’s faith. She described to Pittendrigh Macgillivray that

in a way, the War pulled me back into living. There were little things even I could do. And the horror of it all tortured one so that one was galvanised above one’s self, if one had human feelings […] The War drove me to feel that I must live and make good yet. To feel less would be cowardly.⁷³

This rejection of wartime apathy also manifested in her involvement with the pacificist movement. Early signs of this can be found in the Edinburgh Evening News which printed her poem about the Boer War which she dedicated to both ‘Boer and Briton’ and called for those involved to become ‘Lessoned, from greed and error’.⁷⁴ In 1914, Jessie was a supporter of World Citizenship, a global cooperative movement founded by Yervant H. Iskender that called for the end of all conflicts and the eradication of nationalism in favour of world citizenship via a universal passport – other supporters included J. Ramsay McDonald, H. G. Wells, and Annie Besant.⁷⁵ Together with her belief in Scottish Home Rule,⁷⁶ Jessie’s interests in occultism, neo-Catholicism and the peace movement place her firmly within the fin-de-siècle cultural revival in Scotland. Although outwith established networks of revival, like Patrick Geddes and his colleagues at the Evergreen (1895–97), she was part of the rising creative energies of the cultural revival across Scotland.

Jessie annie anderson and the scottish literary revival

Jessie was keenly aware that she was a minor literary figure and embraced this status by promoting and supporting fellow minor and working-class poets and writers. This began with the memorialisation of her friend Lewis Morrison Grant, a working-class poet from Keith who died of illness at a young age in 1891 and was colloquially known as ‘the Northern Keats’.⁷⁷ Following his death, Jessie launched a memorial subscription in the local press to raise money for his family and edited a collection of his poetry, letters, and biography to wide acclaim.⁷⁸ This included Hugh MacDiarmid: Jessie recalled that in correspondence with MacDiarmid in 1922, he told her that he had been given a copy as a boy by a ‘discerning teacher’ and that it ‘had had more influence upon his youth than any other work’.⁷⁹ In subsequent letters to Pittendrigh Macgillivray, MacDiarmid’s comment appears to have been sentimental flattery, primarily to ensure Jessie’s permission for her inclusion in Northern Numbers and to get manuscript copies of her poems – namely, a notebook – which Jessie sent him and was incensed when he never returned it to her: ‘I did try hard to get him to return that, it was both irreplaceable and had associations; but he “never let on” ’.⁸⁰

She also published the biography and poetry of James Wilfred Cryer, a mechanical engineer in Bolton.⁸¹ Along with her friend Alexander J. Grant, Jessie, Cryer, and another newspaper poet, Lenzie-based Margaret Thomson MacGregor (‘Nefert-Ari’), seem to have been an energetic network of friends and correspondents. After Grant’s death in 1911, the remaining three friends published poems in his memory in the Banffshire Herald, in which Grant had operated the newspaper’s ‘Literary Column’ under the pseudonym ‘The Bookman’.⁸² Jessie’s network of minor literary figures and newspaper poets also included John Fullerton (‘Wild Rose’), Isabella Fyvie Mayo, Agnes S. Falconer, and Elizabeth Sophia Watson (‘Deas Cromarty’), to whom she dedicated various newspaper articles, poetry volumes, and poems throughout her life. Although women were marginalised from many of the social and institutional networks that supported minor poetry in Scotland,⁸³ Jessie’s commitment to her fellow newspaper and magazine poets demonstrates how women forged their own networks to support their literary careers.

As William Donaldson has demonstrated, Scottish literature, particularly that published in the periodical press, was a rich source of Scots language and dialects in the late Victorian era.⁸⁴ As someone who was active at the height of the vernacular press as well as during the emergence of the Scottish Literary Revival, Jessie was well aware of the irony in the renewal and re-interest in literature written in Scots in the 1920s. In reference to Lewis Morrison Grant, she told Pittendrigh Macgillivray that

The ‘Scotsman’ of L. M. G.’s brief day came heavily down upon the Scottish Lyrics. Yet you will, I think, find that they are of the kind which the ‘Chapbook’ Press is now acclaiming – something allied to Scotland and in which more truly Scots than is the merely colloquial, misnamed ‘the vernacular’.⁸⁵

Jessie’s insights mirror those of MacDiarmid, in that they both spoke out against the over-popularisation of Scots in fiction, poetry, and the periodical press.⁸⁶ In 1884, Jessie responded to an editorial in the Aberdeen edition of the People’s Journal about the use of Scots and argued that ‘Bad Scotch jars one’s ear like bad music, and no one with a talent for writing it would think of putting his talent out to usury in a police report’.⁸⁷ She concluded by stating that ‘The aim of modern Scotch bards is to put a Scotch dress on every English word in their vocabulary with the object of leaving the readers’ brains in a chaos of bewilderment’.⁸⁸ Like MacDiarmid, Jessie was highly critical of the Kailyard and its impact on Scottish literature:

The truth is the modern Scot has wanted to make out that the Scots peasant is a cross between Harry Lauder and a Kirk Elder. Ian Maclaren departed this life with a heavy sin on his soul! And Robertson Nicol was far from guiltless in that he ‘eeked’ him up to the saltless productions!⁸⁹

Ultimately, Jessie respected MacDiarmid’s impact on the Scottish Literary Revival:

He [MacDiarmid] has done a great deal to wake up young Scotland to the fact that there has always been a golden thread of genius running through the national newspapers. If it did nothing for younger Scotland than blow the dust aside from the little handful of works wrought by the older, but still live and working Scotland, the ‘Chapbook’ Press has done good, practical, needed work.⁹⁰

That being said, she was also sceptical about his ambitions to marry his literary project with his political one:

I think he is pretty much an over-worked tool. That anything like a genuine and independent love for the Arts and Literature is the back-bone of the Chapbook Movement I cannot see. There is a strongly Collectionist suggestion about the whole output. Quite possibly it is partly financed by Labour politics. I don’t say it is Labourist, but I do think that quite a lot of ‘ists’ and ‘isms’ are tied up in its Fascist bulkiness.⁹¹

In her letters, Jessie was critical of the women poets associated with the Scottish Renaissance – a term that she specifically used in her correspondence – particularly Mary Symon, whom she deemed to be promoting a ‘bourgeoisie sort of culture, hand in hand with the vernacular’, which she called ‘the curse of this Renaissance, as it has always been the curse of, and impediment to, living arts and letters in any land, any age’.⁹² She considered Barbara Ross Mackintosh (McIntosh) ‘far beneath Mary Symon’,⁹³ Violet Jacob as ‘really worth reckoning within the Vernacular’,⁹⁴ and Marion Angus as having ‘a lovely sense of the value of sounds in poetry’.⁹⁵ In Rachel Annand Taylor’s work she ‘found more vitality of a kind […] a self-centred, rather posing kind, but intensely alive – a type of woman-hood new to literature, and to be reckoned with’.⁹⁶ She posited that

when Scotland has her Parliament again she will also have a Bard, or Laureate, and the first one will be Lady Margaret Sackville. I suppose most people would say ‘Mrs Violet Jacob’. But she isn’t big enough, or rather her harp has only one good string.⁹⁷

It is perhaps surprising to find such acute and powerful criticism echoing, in many respects, MacDiarmid’s.

In conclusion, this case study of Jessie Annie Anderson’s life, letters, and career demonstrates that there is a generation of minor Scottish women poets whose lives and works have been overlooked in studies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scottish literature. Despite being marginalised in discussions of the Scottish Renaissance and the wider literary revival that gathered speed in the 1920s, a revaluation of Jessie’s contributions – both public and private – complicates our understandings of Scottish literature in the 1880 to 1920 period. That these insights have been gained in the largely overlooked periodical press and in private correspondence with a similarly minor revivalist figure further emphasises the need to look beyond anthologies, annuals, and collections of Scottish literature and incorporate a much broader category of ‘revivalist’. As in Jessie’s case, through the revaluation of minor women writers a more contradictory perspective is gained, especially when this attention goes beyond their published works and includes correspondence, letters, notebooks, private archives, and unpublished manuscript material. As more research is conducted that widens the scope of revival and considers twentieth-century Scottish literature as a much longer (and broader) movement, there will doubtless be more women whose recoveries and wider literary connections will further our revisions.⁹⁸ Ultimately, how these women articulated their opinions and spoke about their work, and each other’s, tells us more about the complexity of modern Scottish literature and our accepted understandings of it, whilst reappraising the context in which MacDiarmid’s pontifications were given and received.⁹⁹