The Highland Widow E-Book

Walter Scott

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 145

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

On a Highland tour intended to soothe agitated spirits, Mrs. Bethune Baliol encounters, amid scenery of stark and startling beauty, the forbidding figure of Elspat MacTavish, living in punishing style in a decrepit and solitary hut. Her curiosity piqued, she learns the tragic tale of the once beautiful and happy wife of the heroic MacTavish Mhor, brought to ruin by her own fierce patriotism and jealous passions. Taken from Chronicles of the Canongate, the first work published by Scott under his own name, The Highland Widow has been said to have established the form of the short story. Written with the boldness characteristic of the famed 'Author of Waverley,' it sees Scott examining issues of national pride and personal failings.

Leseprobe

THE HIGHLAND WIDOW

WALTER SCOTT

FOREWORD BYSTUART KELLY

Hesperus Classics

Published by Hesperides Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street W1W 5PF London

www.hesperus.press

‘The Highland Widow’ first published in Chronicles of the Canongate in 1827

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2010

Foreword ©Stuart Kelly, 2010

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-84391-180-7

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-84391-335-1

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Stuart Kelly

The Highland Widow

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Biographical Note

Also by Hesperus

FOREWORD

STUART KELLY

Many well-read people are content to do without Scott. For Joyce and Woolf he was a dusty, glittery anachronism. For Forster, he was a simplistic dullard and Kurt Vonnegut thought him the epitome of irrelevance. In Scotland, Irvine Welsh and Kevin Williamson denounce Scott as an establishment stooge, who created the ‘sanitised tartan kitsch modern tourist industry’. It’s a stereotype as unjust as those of which they accuse Scott.

The largest monument to a novelist on the planet is to Scott. His works were the catalyst for a worldwide resurgence in the novel, inspiring Balzac, Fontane, Manzoni, Galdos, Dickens, Fenimore Cooper, Lermontov and Sienkiewicz. Scott’s writing is as profuse as he was prolific, and for many readers the sheer extent can be off-putting; which is why ‘The Highland Widow’ is a good, if curious, place to start.

Chronicles of the Canongate, from which ‘The Highland Widow’ is excerpted, occupies a singular place among Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels. It was the first creative work he wrote after the death of his wife, and the first creative work he wrote after the financial crash of 1826, which left him with personal debts totalling £116,838. It was the first of his fictions that was attributed to ‘Sir Walter Scott’ as well as his teasing, pseudonymous alter-ego ‘The Author of Waverley’. Indeed, the first edition even included the public speech where he avowed the authorship. Between Woodstock and Chronicles of the Canongate was the longest gap ever between Scott fictions – a whole eighteen months. It was also – importantly – not a novel.

It was originally published on 5th November 1827 in two volumes rather than the usual triple-decker format, for reasons of pure financial expediency – Scott had made contracts with his erstwhile publisher Constable for an unnamed three-volume novel, and keeping Chronicles of the Canongate a volume shy of that number also kept it out of the hands of Constable and Scott’s creditors. At that time, he was desperately trying to maximise his production: Chronicles of the Canongate comes between his seven-volume Life of Napoleon and before his children’s history of Scotland, Tales of a Grandfather. At the same time he was advertising a forthcoming edition of Shakespeare that never materialised, as well as writing occasional pamphlets, reviews and closet dramas and the contracted novels.

Although the second series of Chronicles of the Canongate was a full-length novel (usually referred to as The Fair Maid of Perth, or Saint Valentine’s Day), the first series was a collection of shorter works: ‘The Highland Widow’, ‘The Two Drovers’ and ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’. These were bound together with a framing narrative, introducing another of Scott’s surrogate narrators, like Captain Clutterbuck, Dr Jonas Dryasdust and Jedediah Cleishbotham and Peter Pattieson in Tales of My Landlord.

In Chronicles of the Canongate, the substitute author is one Chrystal Croftangry, and the descriptions of his situation and reasons for assembling the book are far more fleshed out (seven introductory chapters) than for any of Scott’s previous puppets – and Croftangry shares much more with Scott than any of his predecessors. It is as if having acknowledged that he is ‘The Great Unknown’, Scott can give full flight to his shadow-play of authorship.

Croftangry, as a dissolute young man, had sought the sanctuary of Holyrood Park at the foot of the Canongate, in order to escape his debtors – a plan of action that Scott himself seriously considered when the extent of the crash became evident. Having extricated himself from his legal wrangles, Croftangry went abroad, made a moderate fortune and returned to Edinburgh a reformed character. He is mildly cantankerous and more than slightly rueful, and John Buchan, in his life of Scott, compares the characterisation of Croftangry and his circle as similar to ‘the best work of Tourgeniev’.

Scott provides some humorous interludes where Croftangry, casting around for a purpose, revisits his childhood home. The estate was sold to the owner of a cotton mill, and the old castle demolished to make way for a new ‘huge, lumping four-square pile of freestone’, although it is now ‘going to decay, without having been inhabited’. Commercial speculation had bankrupted that family as well, and a melancholy Croftangry quickly realises that reinhabiting the past is an impossibility (especially since the local inn is run by his mother’s former servant, who has little except sharp reproaches and a needling conscience for Chrystal).

Instead, he recaptures the past in the form of narratives. ‘The object of the whole publication is to throw some light on the manners of Scotland as they were, and to contrast them occasionally with those of the present day’, with the caveat that he will ‘pledge [him]self to no particular line of subjects’.

There is understated humour in Croftangry’s ambitions for his work. Given that Scott was the most famous author in the world at the time, with editions pirated in America and India in his lifetime, reading Croftangry’s pseudo-humble assertion that he is ‘ambitious that [his] compositions, though having their origin in the Valley of Holyrood… should cross the Forth, astonish the long town of Kirkcaldy, enchant the skippers and colliers of the East of Fife, venture even into the classic arcades of St Andrews’ is as knowing as it is charming.

But the humour is marbled with anger: ‘As for a southward direction, it is not to be hoped for in my fondest dreams. I am informed that Scottish literature, like Scottish whisky, will be presently laid under a prohibitory duty.’ London publishers had raged against the ‘Scotch Monopoly’ in the early 1820s – now it was London-based creditors who were proving most recalcitrant to make terms with Scott.

Croftangry obtains the story of the Highland Widow from a ‘blood relative in the Scottish sense – Heaven knows how many degrees removed – and friend in the sense of Old England’, Mrs Bethune Baliol, based on Scott’s friend and great-aunt Mrs Murray Keith.

In Lockhart’s life of Scott, there is a noteworthy anecdote about Mrs Murray Keith. She once asked Scott if she might borrow a copy of the works of Restoration writer Mrs Aphra Behn. She later returns the volume, saying, ‘Take back your bonny Mrs Behn; and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London?’ Mrs Keith learns a lesson about changing taste in the same way as her fictional counterpart will learn a lesson about changing mores, and in each case it is hardly a cause for celebration.

Again, a note of deep melancholy slips into the Croftangry narrative: the story eventually comes with news of Mrs Baliol’s demise. Scott always enjoyed constructing elaborate chains between the subject of the story and the storyteller, and ‘The Highland Widow’ has one of the most convoluted: from the Widow herself, to the Highland postilion that Mrs Baliol hires on her tour of the Highlands when she sees the Widow (Scott has a neat dig at himself when he has Mrs Baliol proclaim her source ‘Neither bard nor sennachie… nor monk, nor hermit, the approved authorities for old traditions’), from Mrs Baliol to Croftangry, who in turn gets the approval of the story from his Gaelic-speaking Highland housekeep, Janet MacEvoy. ‘It is,’ says Scott with typically wry self-deprecation, ‘but a very simple tale, and may have no interest for persons beyond Janet’s rank of life or understanding.’ Janet can later disavow the tale: before ‘The Two Drovers’ she berates Croftangry, saying, ‘I am sure you know a hundred tales better than that about Hamish MacTavish, for it was but about a young cateran and an auld carline, when all’s done; and if they had burned the rudas queen for a witch, I am thinking, maybe they would not have tyned [suffered the loss of] their coals.’

So much for the teller. The tale itself received a favourable reception – most critics concentrated on the failings of ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’, which, to be fair, does end with an elephant stamping on the villain. That Scott had returned, and returned to his native soil, was celebrated. The Gentleman’s Magazine described Elspat MacTavish, the Widow, as being of a particular type in which Scott excelled – an old woman with the ‘tinge of the supernatural elevating the criminal into a region where she is secure from disgust, and where the fear of the beholder is not unmixed with veneration’, adding that she was ‘the best of the author’s creations, not excepting Meg Merrilees [the gypsy in Guy Mannering, and a perennial Scott favourite] herself ’. The resounding, qualified praise was ‘Scott’s lees is better than other men’s wine!’

The story is simple: Elspat’s husband was, if you permit the anachronism, a gangster who ‘esteemed it shame to want anything that could be had for the taking’ and extorted ‘protection money’ from the farmers. After being ‘out’ in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion he was outlawed as a traitor and fell by the shoot-to-kill policy of the Hanoverian ‘Redcoats’. Elspat’s hopes lie with her son, Tavish, whom she expects to continue in his father’s career. He, however, has other ideas, and has donned the red coat himself, in order to become a soldier and fight in America for the Hanoverians – ironically, about to be defeated themselves. Elspat and Tavish have lives far from the centres of political power, yet their clash is representative of the remorseless tide of history itself. And for once, Scott’s attention is fixed on the wrack and jetsam of that tide.

A simple story, but one that examines a complex psychology of guilt, pride, trauma, obstinacy and pathological nostalgia. The normal Waverley Novel would reconcile difference while commemorating the sincerity of the defeated – whether Saxons and Normans or Jacobites and Hanoverians – but ‘The Highland Widow’ refuses the progressive assimilation. There is no hybrid child and happy wedding, but proxy infanticide and persisting fury. You can tell why Mrs Baliol only wants the story to come out after her death, why Janet wants a different Highland story, why Croftangry, in his bemused and sly way, wants the story not to be known in Great Britain, only in his own cranny of Scotland. The story says that forgiveness might not be accepted, and grievances still burn decades later.

Scott made the modern Scotland, and made the very Highlands where Mrs Baliol was a tourist (rather than an anthropological explorer), a tourist destination – the SS Walter Scott still chunters up Loch Katrine. His novels are never propagandist, or shortbread tin cliché. But only in ‘The Highland Widow’ did his guilty conscience surreptitiously take up the quill. Edward Waverley is allowed to waver, but Elspat is adamant. Scott couched this tale in reams of prevarication, whispers, blimpish grumbles and buck-shifting, but the story burns through its fake masquerades. Scott cottoned on to a sectarian, intransigent version of Scottishness in particular and identity in general, and shrank away. The story, stripped of its hums and haas and maybes and whatnots, is about to begin. They are the words of a man who has just lost everything.

THE HIGHLAND WIDOW

CHAPTERONE

It wound as near as near could be,

But what it is she cannot tell;

On the other side it seem’d to be,

Of the huge broad-breasted old oak-tree.

COLERIDGE

Mrs Bethune Baliol’s memorandum begins thus:–

It is five-and-thirty, or perhaps nearer forty years ago, since, to relieve the dejection of spirits occasioned by a great family loss sustained two or three months before, I undertook what was called the short Highland tour. This had become in some degree fashionable, but though the military roads were excellent, yet the accommodation was so indifferent that it was reckoned a little adventure to accomplish it. Besides, the Highlands, though now as peaceable as any part of King George’s dominions, was a sound which still carried terror while so many survived who had witnessed the insurrection of 1745, and a vague idea of fear was impressed on many as they looked from the towers of Stirling northward to the huge chain of mountains, which rises like a dusky rampart to conceal in its recesses a people whose dress, manners and language differed still very much from those of their Lowland countrymen. For my part, I come of a race not greatly subject to apprehensions arising from imagination only. I had some Highland relatives, knew several of their families of distinction, and, though only having the company of my bower-maiden, Mrs Alice Lambskin, I went on my journey fearless.

But then I had a guide and cicerone almost equal to Greatheart in the Pilgrim’s Progress, in no less a person than Donald MacLeish, the postilion whom I hired at Stirling, with a pair of able-bodied horses as steady as Donald himself, to drag my carriage, my duenna and myself wheresoever it was my pleasure to go.

Donald MacLeish was one of a race of post-boys, whom, I suppose, mailcoaches and steamboats have put out of fashion. They were to be found chiefly at Perth, Stirling, or Glasgow, where they and their horses were usually hired by travellers, or tourists, to accomplish such journeys of business or pleasure as they might have to perform in the land of the Gael. This class of persons approached to the character of what is called abroad a conducteur, or might be compared to the sailing master on board a British ship of war, who follows out after his own manner the course which the captain commands him to observe. You explained to your postilion the length of your tour, and the objects you were desirous it should embrace, and you found him perfectly competent to fix the places of rest or refreshment, with due attention that those should be chosen with reference to your convenience, and to any points of interest which you might desire to visit.

The qualifications of such a person were necessarily much superior to those of the ‘first ready’, who gallops thrice a day over the same ten miles. Donald MacLeish, besides being quite alert at repairing all ordinary accidents to his horses and carriage, and in making shift to support them, where forage was scarce, with such substitutes as bannocks and cakes, was likewise a man of intellectual resources. He had acquired a general knowledge of the traditional stories of the country which he had traversed so often, and, if encouraged (for Donald was a man of the most decorous reserve), he would willingly point out to you the site of the principal clan-battles, and recount the most remarkable legends by which the road, and the objects which occurred in travelling it, had been distinguished. There was some originality in the man’s habits of thinking and expressing himself, his turn for legendary lore strangely contrasting with a portion of the knowing shrewdness belonging to his actual occupation, which made his conversation amuse the way well enough.

Add to this, Donald knew all his peculiar duties in the country which he traversed so frequently. He could tell, to a day, when they would ‘be killing’ lamb at Tyndrum or Glenuilt, so that the stranger would have some chance of being fed like a Christian, and knew to a mile the last village where it was possible to procure a wheaten loaf, for the guidance of those who were little familiar with the Land of Cakes. He was acquainted with the road every mile, and could tell to an inch which side of a Highland bridge was passable, which decidedly dangerous⁠*. In short, Donald MacLeish was not only our faithful attendant and steady servant, but our humble and obliging friend, and though I have known the half-classical cicerone of Italy, the talkative French valet-de-place, and even the muleteer of Spain, who piques himself on being a maize-eater, and whose honour is not to be questioned without danger, I do not think I have ever had so sensible and intelligent a guide.

Our motions were of course under Donald’s direction, and it frequently happened, when the weather was serene, that we preferred halting to rest his horses even where there was no established stage, and taking our refreshment under a crag, from which leaped a waterfall, or beside the verge of a fountain, enamelled with verdant turf and wildflowers. Donald had an eye for such spots, and though he had, I dare say, never read Gil Blas or Don Quixote