Annie S. Swan has become recognised as one of the most significant Scottish women authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, her twentieth-century works remain largely under-studied and dismissed due to their critical perception as simply “slushy women’s romances” (Sutherland). Such a view overlooks the potential importance of Swan’s writing in this period for the development of the Scottish popular romance novel. A subgenre that has enjoyed increasing attention and success in recent years, the origins of the modern Scottish romance novel are generally traced to Gabaldon’s Outlander (1991) and imitators in the 1990s and 2000s by authors like Terri Brisbin, Julie Garwood, and Lyndsay Sands. However, as I will argue in this article, Swan’s twentieth-century works display several of the structures and motifs that are definitional for what we now term Scottish popular romance fiction. The article traces the shifting structures of Swan’s twentieth-century writings, as well as her representation of Scotland as primitive, magical, and romantic, showing similarities between 1990s and 2000s Scottish romance and selected works of Swan from the 1910s to 1940s. Ultimately, the article argues that Swan’s twentieth-century works can be classified as part of a longer tradition of Scottish popular romance fiction and that, rather than dismissing her “slushy women’s romances”, we reposition her as an early writer of Scottish popular romance fiction.
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This article focuses on six of Swan’s twentieth-century novels set at least partly in Scotland: A Maid of the Isles: A Romance of Skye (1924); An American Wife (1937); A Breaker of Hearts (1938); The Secret of Skye (1940); The Third Generation (1940); The Family Name (1942). While these novels are largely representative of the later corpus of Swan’s writing, I focus here on individual novels as case studies in order to illustrate specific aspects of plot structure and motif. I compare these later works with two of Swan’s early publications (Wrongs Righted (1881) and Aldersyde (1883)), to illustrate differences from her nineteenth-century works. I further consider Swan’s works alongside two modern Scottish romance novels: Karen Marie Moning’s The Highlander’s Touch (2000), book 3 in the medieval paranormal Highlander series and Lynsay Sands’ An English Bride in Scotland (2013), the first of her Highland Brides series.
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The historical focus of 1990s and 2000s Scottish romance is different to Swan’s twentieth-century works, most of which are contemporary to her time. However, as I will argue, there are several features common to both 1990s and 2000s Scottish romance and to Swan’s works, that indicate the connections between them: the strict adherence to a romance plot structure; the construction of Scotland as the ‘past’; and the inclusion of ‘outsider’ characters to demonstrate external views of Scotland.
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