Overview

This is the story of a literary marriage. It tells of the partnership between Edwin and Willa Muir, two intellectuals from small town Scottish backgrounds and their discovery of Europe in the years after the first and second world wars. It tells us about the cultural, social, and political issues of those dynamic and difficult years and much else, in intimate detail, about their own personal struggles. Edwin Muir was to become a leading poet in the twentieth century Scottish literary renaissance, but to make a living the couple also worked as translators of modern German literature, including key works by Hermann Broch and, most famously, Franz Kafka. They were intimate with many of the leading writers of their time, both at home and abroad, and these contacts, and their travels in Europe gave them a special and sometimes painful insight into the trials of the twentieth century. Dr Margery McCulloch's study draws on personal travel and a wealth of new sources from private correspondence, publishers' archives, the recollections of friends, and the diaries, unpublished journals, and autobiographical memoirs of Edwin and Willa themselves. This is the fullest account of the couple's life and times together during a long and loving marriage, not without its difficulties as Willa struggled to find proper acknowledgement of her translation skills, and space for her own creativity as a novelist in the shadow of her own ill health and Edwin's growing status as a major modern poet.

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9780192858047

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Reviews

The Muirs' immersion in German literature affected and enriched their English writing. Anglophone readers remain in their debt. * Ritchie Robertson, TLS *

Author Information

Margery Palmer McCulloch was an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She has written on Neil M. Gunn and Edwin Muir and co-edited the Scottish Literary Review from 2005 to 2013. A key collection of source documents Modernism and Nationalism (2004) was followed by a monograph on Scottish Modernism and its Contexts (2009). She co-edited Scottish and International Modernisms and the Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid (2011). She had just completed this long-researched joint biography of Edwin and Willa Muir, when she suffered a stroke in 2019 and died at the age of 83. She is survived by her husband the painter Ian McCulloch and their two sons, Neil and Euan.

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