Agnes Owens: The Complete Short Stories

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Unlike her, the reader is aware that Mary has just come to real harm already and that she has in fact repeatedly come to real harm in the past. Coming from a West of Scotland working-class background, and as a mother of seven children, Owens only began her writing career in her early fifties and continually shunned any literary limelight. In spite of Owens’s admiration for and friendship with Gray and Kelman, it is worth noting that she was just as equally adamant that her work was very different from theirs. At the time she started writing, however, working-class urban novels were gradually coming to be seen as a trademark of ‘authentic’ Scottish literature, which somehow turned some of her disadvantages into assets.

org/2009/10/honest-povertyand-agnes-owens-at-70/_______, Of Me and Others , Glasgow: Cargo Publishing, 2014. His statement and his nonchalance are so bewildering she cannot even articulate a full sentence and he continues talking about the silver cup as if he had not even heard her. There she was taught by Liz Lochhead who, along with James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, was a Glasgow University tutor charged with manning their outreach projects. Though this did appear as short stories, it is much better read as a novel, which enables the characters to be drawn more deeply, and to earn the reader’s sympathy, or otherwise, accordingly. As for her taste for “a male character” it seems to have been motivated mainly by her distaste for some recent publications for, in a different context, she had said: “I get vaguely tired of the Scottish situation and the Glasgow man” ( ibid .It is, however, less easy to notice repetitions between two works when one was published four years after the other, unless one takes time to read them again. Drawing on her archives recently donated to the Alasdair Gray Archive (AGA), this will be the first study of the complete writings of Agnes Owens, restoring the importance of her literature of the marginalised, within its West of Scotland setting, to Scottish literary culture, and beyond. One of the most terrible scenes is probably the assault of the middle-aged, amnesiac woman who has escaped from her mental institution in “People Like That”. I kept phoning her on her landline to arrange a time and she would answer promptly, only to tell me with a certain amount of satisfaction that she probably wouldn’t be around when I turned up.

Chapter by chapter Mac’s becomes more troubled; he remains unemployed after months, his close friend has died of drink and exposure, and he has been arrested as an accomplice to a pointless crime. The household is not simply dominantly male in terms of numbers, it is aggressively misogynistic, with a father prone to physical violence and a son who casually mentions his having “[gone] out for a gang bang” ( CSS 150). Levinas’s and Derrida’s works show “not only the centrality of vulnerability within the framework of the ethics of alterity, but also the centrality of the feminine as figure and condition of the ethical relation” (Ganteau 7).It actually contains one of the key moments of the novel, which would not be understood in short story form. To quote Janice Galloway, “now that Scottish writing [had] a profile it [was] a bloke’s profile” (qtd in Jones 210) although her own works, as well as those of A. In “The Hut”, the tabooed female predicament is more specific: the narrator is “never allowed to mention the miscarriage. The black humour weaved through many of the stories also make them very droll at times, at others most poignant, at others just a refreshing factual this is life how-it-is. This will involve comparative studies of Owens’ narrative strategies in different works, forms, and periods: focussing on formal features like ironic distance, frame narratives, implied audiences, blind-spots, and black humour.