Agnes Owens: The Complete Short Stories

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For one of the implications of intersectionality is that in the patriarchal society Owens’s characters inhabit, women are de facto more victimized than men 4 . In their hetereosexual phallocentric world, however, men are less likely to be raped or institutionalised.

I mean, most men can’t help being abusive to women, and they might be good husbands, they might be good fathers, but they might also feel, “I’m the boss”, you know. Regardless of the motives that lie behind the silencing, being silenced is a trauma, as is made clear in “The Silver Cup”.It is, however, less easy to notice repetitions between two works when one was published four years after the other, unless one takes time to read them again. Her age, her unglamorous lifestyle and the non-ameliorative dimension of her fiction have been evoked to explain her lack of recognition.

However she is also a murderess and the realistic elements in the story are undermined by burlesque fairy-tale details and the playful hint that the French village in which she will live happily ever after is a utopian place where “no one is expected to pay more than they can afford” ( CSS 296). The snag was, I had to be obedient, well mannered and speak with a proper accent which was the hardest thing to do. He and his mates are often desperate for money or booze, and some of the very black scenes made me laugh out loud. A chronic housing shortage pushed them to follow the promise of work and lodgings in the North of Scotland. In this parodic fairy-tale, the heroine’s addiction to reading alienates her from everyone and even leads her to commit several murders until she becomes too blind to read, makes a bonfire with all her books and “dance [s] around the ashes with a feeling of freedom” ( CSS 318).

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A central theme running through Owens’ work is marginalisation: her texts illuminate outsider figures who, because of their status, reveal absurdities in our social relations, our psychology, and our value systems.As the novel proceeds the humour is darker, and there is less of it, but very much to the benefit of the story, fewer laughs but much more poignant. Though this did appear as short stories, it is much better read as a novel, which enables the characters to be drawn more deeply, and to earn the reader’s sympathy, or otherwise, accordingly. Owens’s last collection of short stories includes texts entitled “Meet the Author” and “The Writing Group”. The following reactions of Jackie Kay and James Kelman, for instance, are cases in point: “I remember doing an interview once, and they just had as the headline ‘Black Lesbian Scottish’.

I’ve had it with journalists comparing the sunniness of my flowers with the darkness of my stories,” she said, rolling eyes that flashed with mischief. the postscript by Alasdair Gray makes more sense than I can cobble together and also has an interesting history of working class writing in Britain. Clearly the vulnerability of Mai, Betty and Peggy involves other elements than their gender – mainly issues of economic power and childhood’s frailty – yet in all cases we are dealing with women’s victimization by men. There is the suggestion that her stories don’t sell well because they are sad, which is a comment that has often been made about Owens’s work. Given that her female characters are the focal point of this paper, such a statement deserves some further consideration and contextualisation.Discovered by Scots writing royalty Liz Lochead, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, her work never really did find the recognition it deserved, with Gray bemoaning her as “the most unfairly neglected of all living Scottish authors”. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) was highly praised by Anthony Burgess and has acquired the status of a classic and Poor Things (1992) won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Award in 1992. Her position is therefore to be seen as a reaction – or even a form of resistance – to a particular context rather than as a definitive position on gender issues.