Elizabeth Hamilton (1758-1816), Jane Porter (1776-1850), Mary Brunton (1778-1818), Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781-1857) and Susan Ferrier (1782-1854) were among the most interesting women writing in the early nineteenth century. Like the work of a number of other once popular novelists who have now largely sunk from sight, their fiction and other writings were widely read, admired and influential in their own time, and, in some cases, continued to be so until later in the nineteenth century.

These writers are varied in their attitudes and interests, diverse in their styles and techniques, and we do not wish to suggest they form a ‘group’ or reduce them to fit some preconceived pattern. Nevertheless, working as they did around the same time, and often with an awareness of each other's work, they show some shared concerns. These writers were all working, too, in a period when there were particular pressures on them both as women and as Scottish writers. The strains and paradoxes that shape their fiction do not result in ‘flawed’ work, however; rather, we suggest, their writings are unusually interesting and rich for the modem reader.

The early nineteenth century was a period of cultural vitality: the years following the French and American Revolutions saw political ferment and important intellectual debates in Britain, which fed into the literature of the time. Despite the diaspora created by both colonialism and Clearances, Scotland, and in particular post-Enlightenment Edinburgh, where many of the writers discussed here lived at least for a time, remained a hive of intellectual activity Sir Walter Scott, the ‘Great Unknown’ novelist who dominates the period, tends to be presented as the key figure in the development of the historical and ‘national’ novel at this time. Yet women writers played an important role in the evolution not only of historical fiction, but of so-called ‘regional’ writing; and writers like Porter and Hamilton contributed to a general interest in nationalism in the period.

This was also, though, a period of some self-doubt in Scotland. The effects of the 1707 Union continued to manifest themselves in various ways. It is important to recognise the extent to which writers were working within a British framework; with considerable pressure from London, economic as well as cultural, even those writers who continued to live mainly in Scotland were affected.