"Private Thoughts and Public Display: Gender, Genre and Lives."

How did nineteenth-century Scottish writers treat gender, memory, and life writing in the public and private spheres? This chapter addressed that question with attention to five writers, three women and two men. The burning of Lord Byron’s memoirs by friends and associates in 1824, shortly after the poet’s death, is a focal point for the topic of privacy. What Byron’s friends hid from the public domain remains one of the contentious high points of all-time literary mystery. Walter Scott expressed his regret at the loss of those papers, citing the directness and disdain for order in Byron’s remaining private recollections as the inspiration for his own journal. Byron and Scott were, and remain, two of the most publicly visible Scottish authors of their time. Byron’s subversive masculinity and Scott’s admission in his journal that he could write as well as any in the ‘Big Bow-wow strain’ problematize the role played gender in their letters and journals, as well in other of their works. But The wider context that was Scottish writing in the early 19th Century includes women authors who, while neglected since their deaths, have recently received more attention. How do the voices of women writers establish a more invigorating, expansive picture of gender and memory as forces in the public, private and domestic spheres of Scotland’s literary society? When brought into perspective alongside Byron and Scott, female authors quickly decenter and ironize assumptions about their male contemporaries. Women writers considered in this chapter include Susan Ferrier, Mary Brunton and Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus.