Willa Muir – författare

"But any story about human beings is bound to have an end, like this story about us, a pair of ingenuous people who fell in love and went journeying together through life, blundering by good luck in the right directions so that we came to a lasting wholeness and joy in each other. It has happened before; it will happen again; it happened to us. We belonged together." Belonging: A Memoir by Willa Muir, first published in 1968, is a moving and unashamed account of her long and deep relationship with her literary husband Edwin Muir. Beginning with their first meeting in Glasgow in 1918, Willa Muir then charts the many travels, homes, projects, decisions, joys and hardships of their forty-one years together. Often viewed as being overshadowed by her more acclaimed partner, Belonging asserts the decision of an intellectual and passionate woman to believe that the concept of 'True Love' is the only sustaining philosophy and basis for happiness.Willa Muir's account is however no delusional romantic tale, and her detailed narration of her life with Edwin Muir is balanced and grounded by her perceptive comments of the patriarchal world she existed in and her recognition that her own attempts at literary greatness were constantly shaped by domestic concerns.Belonging serves therefore as a nuanced contribution to the genre of female authored life-writing as constructed by one of Scotland's foremost literary women. Aileen Christianson is a Senior Lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her interest in letters and journals' relationship to published writings, as well as critical analyses of a neglected Scottish modernist writer, has been explored in her monograph, Moving in Circles: Willa Muir's Writings. She has also worked in the area of gender and nation mainly in relation to twentieth century Scottish women writers

The Usurpers, Willa Muir's fourth novel, was written in the early 1950s and was based on the diaries she kept in Prague in the period 1945-1948, when her husband the poet Edwin Muir was the Director the British Institute in Prague, the lecturing and teaching arm of the British Council there. Under the guise of Utopians in Slavomania, The Usurpers offers acute, humorous and sometimes acerbic observations on relations among the British themselves in Prague (the city is never named) and between them and their Czech friends and those in the Czechoslovak establishment who were suspicious of the British presence, and depicts, largely through the actions and conversation of its characters, a deteriorating political environment in which the lives of many Slavomanians and even some of the Utopians are increasingly under threat in the lead-up to the Communist coup of February 1948. The Usupers was ready for publication in 1952 and was submitted to a number of major UK publishers under the pen-name Alexander Cory. The publishers were nervous. There was some concern about libel suits and perhaps also about the political sensitivity of the contents. Then, when she was publicly revealed to be the author, Willa Muir withdrew it. The typescript, from which this edition has been prepared, has long been in the care of the Library of the University of St Andrews and over the years a number of critics and Willa Muir enthusiasts have read it, among them Jim Potts, who brought it to the attention of Colenso Books and who has provided the Introduction. The non-publication of the The Usurpers in the 1950s may have been partly due to political pressure, at a time when the UK government’s grant-in-aid to the British Council was being called in question.