It’s time women’s writing was taken seriously and not simply corralled into crime or packaged as chick-lit, hears Dani Garavelli in The Scotsman.

... Professor Willy Maley, co-founder of Glasgow University’s creative writing course, thinks discrimination [against women writers] is particularly entrenched in Scotland because of its male-dominated literary lineage which runs from Walter Scott to Alasdair Gray and James Kelman. “It’s a gendered landscape,” he says. “And I think the same snobbery that applies to literary notions of popular fiction have worked against many prominent and gifted writers, for example Dorothy Dunnett. It’s easier for women writers to make a home in established genres than to break into the literary fiction niche.”  Read more.

No kind of writing is an island, entire of itself: romances incorporate motifs and settings from epic poetry, Norse sagas, Middle Eastern tales, saints’ lives, chronicles, and lyric love poetry. Most of all, romances are impelled by the narrative shape of a life, tracing an arc from orphaned child to emperor, from exile to return, or from slandered daughter to revered queen. In this way, they create person-shaped narratives that satisfy our repeated desire to learn about ourselves through telling stories.

And if that doesn't sum up Dorothy Dunnett's story-telling, what does?

There is a wonderful collection of medieval (and newer) manuscripts to be seen in Oxford at the moment as part of the Bodleian Library's The Romance of the Middle Ages exhibition. Visit the Bodleian website for a glimpse of the treasures on display and a fascinating video recorded by Oxford academics who explain the history and significance of them.

The exhibition is on until 13th May.  And if you can make it on Wednesday 7th March or Friday 23rd March, you can sit in on a lunchtime lecture by Dr Nicholas Perkins (University Lecturer and Tutor in English, St Hugh's College, Oxford; Curator of the exhibition) or Prof Helen Cooper (Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Magdalene College, Cambridge).  If you can possibly get there, this exhibition is not to be missed - and it doesn't cost a penny to get in.

The book that accompanies the exhibition is on sale at amazon.co.uk.

The Dorothy Dunnett Society has added three Amazon storefronts to its website at DunnettCentral.org.  Every purchase made from Amazon - not just of books - via those storefronts will result in some of Amazon's profits going to the Society.

The latest Dunnett addition to the Amazon catalogue is five of the Dolly/Johnson Johnson mysteries that have just been republished for Kindle.  There are three more on the way to complete the set, and the whole series will also be released as printed books.  Kindle books aren't available yet on amazon.ca, but Canadian readers can find them at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk.

Visit DunnettCentral's "Shop at Amazon" page to see more, and bookmark the link that leads to your preferred Amazon site.  Don't forget to pass it on to your friends and family, too!

We highly recommend any Dunnett reader to see this exhibition at the British Library if they can. It is on in London until 13 March 2012. It showcases the illustrations in the handwritten books, bibles and psalters made for successive English and French kings in the Middle Ages, covering a period from about 750–1603.

There is a good collection of illustrations created in Bruges c. 1450 and one, in particular, features some ladies beside a river (or could it be a canal?) with their henins blowing vigorously in the wind! For the technocrats among you, there is a Smartphone App available through bl.uk/app.

The beautiful exhibition catalogue is on sale at amazon.co.uk

According to Bill’s Dunnett Blog, and confirmed to us by the publisher, House of Stratus, Dorothy Dunnett’s Dolly novels, also known as the Johnson Johnson mysteries, are being republished in both book and electronic format and should be available in about two weeks’ time.

by Sarah L Johnson

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Historical-Fiction-Guide-Genreflecting-Advisory/dp/159158129X

A comprehensive guide to historical fiction, recently gaining a follow-up volume bringing the survey up to mid-2008. This guide does not neglect Dorothy Dunnett, identifying her works as cross-genre titles. They are listed alongside swashbuckling tales, but straddle adventure, literary and traditional sub genres. Johnson notes that Dunnett's 'beloved' books can be appreciated on many levels, which explains their popularity with many different types of readers.

Another author who likes Dorothy Dunnett is Amanda Scott, author of Highland Hero:

“… two of my all-time favorite books are The Border Lord by Jean Westcott and The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett. Who knew at the time I first read them that both include history relating to my own Scott family or that I would one day write Scottish romances?”  Read more.

Helen Castor is an academic historian, writer and broadcaster.  Her sister Harriet (HM Castor) has written over 40 fiction and non-fiction books and has just published her first historical novel.  Harriet calls big sister Helen her first history teacher, and has published an interview with her on The History Girls blog.

Would you say that historical fiction played a role in fostering your enthusiasm for history as a child and teenager?  (And if so did it do anything in particular in that regard?)

Without a doubt.  Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time conveys an overwhelming sense of the excitement of the detective-work (literally, in her hero’s case) involved in historical research.  And, given that a lot of academic writing is more concerned with analysing the past from a distance than reinhabiting it from the inside (if that makes sense), it was Dorothy Dunnett’s fiction that provided me with experience, rather than simply intellectual understanding, of the complexity, sophistication and unpredictability of the medieval and Tudor world.  Read more.

They don't make bridies in Bergen or Tunnock's Tea Cakes in Torsby.

Nor is Hakkebøf half as popular in Hamilton or Helensburgh as it is in Hvidovre.

But the North Sea which separates Scotland from Scandinavia could become slightly less of a divide if political leaders in Edinburgh have their way. Read more on the BBC website.

Bill Marshall, who was a personal friend of Dorothy Dunnett, recently came across a second hand copy of The Scottish Highlands, a book of photos for which she and her husband Alastair wrote the foreword and chapter descriptions.  Bill writes in his Dunnett Blog:

Memory sometimes plays odd tricks – there is a little more text than I remembered, both the initial section by Dorothy and the chapter descriptions by Alastair, and it’s interesting to find that in this context their writing styles were very similar. It’s lovely to read snippets of stories of their travels by hill pony, yacht and motor cruiser, and their clear love of the Scottish countryside, even though they explored it in different ways. It seems that unlike Alastair, who wandered the hills with friends like Michael Powell and Seton Gordon, Dorothy was no hill walker.  We also learn that although she enjoyed skating she hadn’t good balance and wasn’t very good at it. Apart from cooking that must have been about the only thing she wasn’t good at!

There's a bit more about the book at http://dunnettcentral.org/dorothy/books – scroll to the bottom of the page too see the image of the front cover.