Agnes Owens: The Complete Short Stories

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They are misfits whose suffering is invisible in the eyes of others, including those who have the professional responsibility of looking after them.

Well, there's been no shortage of tough social realism in the Vale for the past 200 years or so, and Agnes has accumulated enough life experience for any number of novels. In the way Owens’s characters refuse to be silenced, one can see a similar insurrection of the small, invisible lives that have so often been excluded from history. Oh, my poor Brian, ’ she said aloud, wanting to cry but unable to do so with the man’s weight crushing against her. The difficulty of fitting her into a particular canon on the grounds of her gender, nationality or social class may for a while have kept her at the margin of literary history but this is also what makes her such a significant, disruptive voice, from both an ethical and aesthetic point of view. Aware of the comic potential of her husband’s and son’s latest row, Sammy’s mother sees it as an opportunity to finally integrate the local female community by telling her neighbours about it: “She longed to speak rather than listen” ( CSS 151).

The process of social assimilation implies that the girl should renounce her former identity and, quite significantly, learn to speak in a different voice. It has begun with the teacher who “put a big cross” ( CSS 370) through the narrator’s partly autobiographical composition.

Trifling, commonplace details are mentioned to emphasise her distress, such as the fact that “she had newly sewn on that morning” ( CSS 241) the buttons that her rapist reaps off her coat. While Owens’s view on the relation between gender and vulnerability is subtle, she sometimes seems to endorse rather conventional essentialist stances on genders. There was a determination to bring to fiction the unimagined: voices, people and places denied cultural existence” (Stark 111).It took all your time to get through the day,” Owens told me that day in Balloch, some 20 years later. Pirie-Hunter, Rupert Alexander, “After Scotland’s Literary ‘Golden Age’: Locating Agnes Owens”, MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2015. Her position is therefore to be seen as a reaction – or even a form of resistance – to a particular context rather than as a definitive position on gender issues. She is, however, prone to self-pity while Owens never seems to indulge in self-pity in her interviews and insists on the importance of humour in her fiction, albeit a dark kind of humour. At one stage it seemed Agnes’ only hope was to have the book endorsed by the hugely popular Billy Connolly.

This is what motivates the numerous repetitions within and between her stories but these repetitions can be oppressive for the reader. Moreover, his being compared to a rag-doll and described as “fragile” as well as Arabella’s condescending comment that “she could have helped him if he had let her” ( CSS 6) are quite effective from the point of view of gender role reversal. Next came the short story collection People Like That, in 1996, which included the brief but astonishing biographical tale Marching to the Highlands and into the Unknown.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. In For the Love of Willie Owens' takes a sensitive, canny look at wartime teenage pregnancy – as relevant now as ever. The second part – devoted to the victimization of women – will therefore be followed by an analysis of their rebellion and of Owens’s fiction as an act of insurrection. At the time it was published short stories were considered more difficult to market, so Owens rewrote them with some continuity, and I think that works really well. Having written short stories for her writing group from the late 1970's, Agnes's first novel, Gentlemen of the West appeared in 1985.

This scene makes it clear that it is not simply that “kind of story” ( CSS 370) that normal people would like to cross out of sight but, more precisely, that kind of people.OpenEdition is a web platform for electronic publishing and academic communication in the humanities and social sciences.