Willa Muir, a twentieth-century Scotswoman, wrote in fiction and non-fiction about gender inequality, patriarchy, and the repressiveness of Calvinism, but never defined herself as a feminist. She was alert to the devaluing of women's work, although she played whole-heartedly the role of supportive wife to her better-known husband, the poet and critic
Edwin Muir. She published two novels, a story, and several substantial essays on the condition of women and on Scottish culture.
Along with her husband she translated over forty volumes, mostly German fiction. She did some of these 'collaborative' translations on her own, though library catalogues tend to assign responsibility differently from the way she does. Undoubtedly her own are those published under the pseudonym 'Agnes Neill Scott'. After her husband's death in 1959, she edited a volume of his poetry and wrote an autobiography celebrating their forty-year marriage. She left unpublished work including two more novels.
Milestones
1930 WM and
Edwin Muir published the first English translation of
Franz Kafka's unfinished novel
The Castle (
Die Schloss), six years after Kafka's death.
By 2 July 1931 In her first novel,
Imagined Corners, WM examined the repression and fragmentation of the self through two women who bear the same name but present opposing images of femininity.
1969 WM's
Laconics, Jingles, and Other Verses (including "Ballad of the Dominant Male") was privately published by the
Enitharmon Press in a limited edition of 200 copies.