The eighteenth century was for Scotland the kind of period that makes sense of the Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’. It was a time neither comfortable nor stable and yet it moved, admittedly at great cost to some, toward the great intellectual flourishing of the turn of the century and beyond, and in its course, the way was paved for the commercial successes of Victorian Scotland. It is framed at one end by the ‘killing time’ of the 1680s and at the other by the economic upheavals and radical troubles of the early years of the nineteenth century. In between, Scotland saw the Union of 1707, the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745 and the resultant reprisals, followed by the romantici- sation of the Highlands. But it is equally the time of the Scottish Enlightenment working toward the intellectual ascendancy of the end of the century. It is, of course, possible to vary both the frame and the picture but it is not easy to avoid the evidence of a confused mixture of suffering and disaster with achievement and optimism. Much shaping activity was proceeding as part of both conscious and unconscious national definition - and national here may be taken to mean both the notion of Scotland and that of Britain. The second half of the eighteenth century in particular was a time of consolidation of meanings of Scottishness and a time of construction of ways of Britishness.

It certainly seems easier to demonstrate the ways in which non-fictional writing responds to and helps to shape the ideologies of its time than with fiction, poetry and drama. In some cases women's writing is a direct result of political pressures, might not indeed have existed at all but for specific historical circumstances. 1 am thinking of letters written to absent family or memoirs of people and places arising from unavoidable travel. All the early letters from women in the Dunlop family papers fall into these categories. The women of the Dunlop family stayed at home and wrote to absent husbands or brothers: the letters of Sarah Carstares to her husband, William Dunlop, ‘My dearst and desirable heart’, in exile from the ‘killing times’ in Carolina, are particularly moving in their combination of practicality and affection.