Agnes Owens: The Complete Short Stories

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While this implied that Owens’s national and social disadvantages suddenly appeared to have become assets, it concurrently turned her gender into an even greater hindrance to her critical recognition since those urban working-class novels were quintessentially male 2 . It took all your time to get through the day,” Owens told me that day in Balloch, some 20 years later. Romanzo corale costituito da una serie di episodi tra loro connessi, l’opera narra le vicende di Mac, muratore ventiduenne che fatica a sbarcare il lunario nella Glasgow degli anni Ottanta.

Never in Owens’s fiction do we find benevolent communities in which her characters can hope to find solace or protection. In For the Love of Willie Owens' takes a sensitive, canny look at wartime teenage pregnancy – as relevant now as ever.

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She was particularly pleased, here at last was a ‘proper book’ unlike the slim volumes that had gone before it. Gentlemen of the West was originally published as a novel, though often seen as a series of short stories. In “The Silver Cup”, for instance, Sammy’s father refuses to watch anything “which related to female predicaments” and “Sammy’s Ma had learned to keep her mouth shut about what she liked” ( CSS 146). In “The Hut”, the tabooed female predicament is more specific: the narrator is “never allowed to mention the miscarriage. When read in isolation, her short stories and novellas are stories of defeat yet, once they are read together and allowed to resonate with each other, they depict the insurrection of small, invisible lives and engage our response-ability as readers.

After considering her position towards a gender-oriented conception of literature, this paper will explore how the victimization of women in her fiction functions as a paradigm of vulnerability and how her relentless depiction of disempowerment becomes both an aesthetic and an ethical choice. But as far as writing’s concerned, I think that men are getting shoved out of the road now, and it’s the women that are taking over, and you see, I don’t think men are up to much, but I like a male character, if you know what I mean. There is only one example in all of Owens’s fiction where the main character achieves a form of success that it is both enduring and socially acceptable. The narrowing down of women’s space can, however, go further than denying them access to the public sphere of the workplace. Picaresque, the stories present a series of snapshots and the reader is forced to engage and thus to care for the characters and about their plight by having to making the necessary links.

Isolated Owens’s stories are stories of defeat, when they are read collectively and allowed to resonate with one another they create “the huge, invisible, silent roar of all the people who are too small to record” (Kennedy 64).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). 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”. I studied one big stone closely and could make out a fancy design with words written underneath, ‘Here Lies the Corpse of Jessie Buchanan’. The building turned out to be merely a hit, neatly boarded up and of no earthly interest, but beyond that was the entrance to a graveyard. She did not do well at school and went on to learn typing at college, before she married for the first time to a man who was badly affected by his experiences in the war and drank heavily.