Lost Willa Muir manuscript finally published
A ‘lost’ novel by 20th century Scottish writer and translator, Willa Muir, was published almost 70 years after she wrote it.
‘The Usurpers’ is set in Prague in the late 1940s as Czechoslovakia was just starting to recover from German occupation during the Second World War. The characters in the novel are mainly based on real people and real situations and the insidious influence of the Communist Party which culminated in the coup of February 1948. Essentially a comic novel, political infiltration, intimidation and violence, restrictions on freedom of speech, and the crushing of dissent all feature in the story.
Fifty-three years after the death of the renowned feminist author, ‘The Usurpers’ has now been published thanks to Colenso Books and the University of St Andrew’s Special Collections team, Fine Books Magazine wrote.
Two typed versions of the manuscript for the novel have been in the university’s Special Collections since the 1970s, along with the rest of Willa’s papers, and remained unpublished until now.
Willa Muir was a student at the University of St Andrews from 1907-1911, when Minnie Anderson – as she was then known – was awarded a first-class degree in Classics. She married the poet Edwin Muir in 1919 and the couple led a peripatetic life around Europe, subsisting by teaching, writing, and translating. Their translations included works by Franz Kafka, which they brought to a British audience for the first time. ‘The Usurpers’ is set in Prague at the time when Edwin was Director of the British Institute there, from 1945-1948.
While ‘The Usurpers’ is published more than 50 years after her death, Willa also published two novels during her lifetime, ‘Imagined Corners’ (1931) and ‘Mrs Ritchie’ (1933). Her first, ‘Imagined Corners,’ is set in the fictional town of Calderwick, modelled on Willa’s hometown of Montrose and tells the story of the fictional Elizabeth Shand who, trapped in a conventional marriage, rebels against the constraints on women in the patriarchal society of small-town Scotland in the early 20th century.