ON August 19, 2018, the Edinburgh International Book Festival presented a rehearsed reading of Doctors of Philosophy, a play by Muriel Spark premiered in London in 1962 and was then – notwithstanding its author’s global success in the subsequent decades – largely forgotten by critics, publishers and theatre directors. The success of the festival’s reading was enough to confirm that this is a work as subtle and witty as any of Spark’s more famous novels. Why then, of all her works, has this one been consigned to oblivion? More generally, what makes a literary voice or an individual text “disappear” from the canon – the literary memory of a national community?

Similar questions were implicitly raised by the excellent event presented at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow, on May 11 this year, with the collaboration of Brae Editions of Orkney. The event was entitled “A Nudge for Joan Ure”. Smaller in scale than the Spark Book Festival event, it was nonetheless equally effective in retrieving the complexity and wit of an extraordinary literary voice, and in revealing its vibrant contemporaneity – a voice of “disarming integrity” and “wicked ingenuousness” to borrow from Ian Brown’s commemorative poem, At Antalya Remembering Joan.

Joan Ure’s was of course first and foremost a powerful (post)feminist voice, speaking directly to our times, through her choice of an ironic, often understated, and fluid stance – The Tiny Talent, the poem after which the 2018 edited collection is titled, being an eloquent example of this. Alan Riach eloquently highlighted the specific interest and originality of her work both as a poet and as a playwright, and the performers went a long way to showcase the Glaswegian poet and playwright’s sophisticated art and deep humanity.

The event was enriched by the lively participation of a well-informed audience. A number of spectators (including Alasdair Gray, one of several friends of Ure’s in attendance, and a keen supporter of her work) took part in the final debate. This was not simply to ask questions, but to share their personal memories of the writer, evoking her as soft-voiced, kind and mesmeric, and highlighting her commitment to her work, as well as her unique style and self-contained elegance. Such glimpses of the writer’s life and abruptly interrupted vision – Ure died aged 59 in 1978 – made for a precious and inspiring coda to the more formal part of the event.

The event also provided an opportunity to re-launch The Tiny Talent, a selection of poems by Ure, edited by Richie McCaffery and Alistair Peebles, with a foreword by Alasdair Gray, and published by Brae Editions on the author’s centenary. A most appropriate advertisement, as this slim volume is indeed a gem. As Riach pointed out in his article-review in The National (Joan Ure: The Scots poet and playwright who set a precedent, February 25), the elegance and sharpness of the poems anthologised there show that “a serious reassessment of the quality of her poetry is clearly required”.

Ure has been remembered by historians and critics of Scottish drama — she features, for example, in Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan’s edited volume A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (1997), in Ian Brown’s edited volume The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (2011) and in his Scottish Theatre: Diversity, Language, Continuity (2013). But her poetic talent is indeed largely a 21st-century rediscovery.

Writers, women writers in particular, may be sidelined or forgotten for a number of reasons — very often because their vision or style are in conflict with contemporary dominant ideologies or literary conventions. But this does not mean that the work of a writer who has been classified as “minor” is indeed minor, and this review provides me with the opportunity to join the organisers and speakers of the GoMA event in calling for a revaluation of Ure’s work, and indeed of her context in the Glasgow literary and theatrical scene of the 1950s-70s, a topic raised during the conclusion of the “Nudge”.

The recent “canonisation” of Scottish writer Nan Shepherd and in particular of her masterpiece, The Living Mountain, provides an example of a trajectory from a relatively dark corner of the Scottish literary canon to the spotlight of reprinted books and media attention. Ure would certainly deserve the same consideration.

It is only through the reassessment of outstanding and yet marginalised figures like her that our understanding of Scottish literature can take on new, more nuanced and contemporary forms. Indeed, as Joy Hendry thoughtfully observes in her review of the recent volume, “tiny talents (or not so tiny) [are] buried everywhere in so many different ways”.
Carla Sassi
Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Verona