Other Scottish Authors

We hold important manuscripts by many other Scottish authors, either in small self-standing collections, or as part of larger archival collections.

Our collections contain literary manuscripts, correspondence, and personal papers by many of Scotland's most significant writers:

There are 16th-century manuscripts of works by Gavin Douglas and Alexander Montgomerie.
17th-century documents include works by William Drummond and Elizabeth Melville, Scotland’s first published woman writer.
Enlightenment-period manuscripts include correspondence by Hugh Blair and James Boswell.
There are poems in the hand of Robert Burns, and of other Vernacular Revivalists including Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and Lady Anne Lindsay.
Further important 18th-century manuscripts include works by James Thomson and Henry Mackenzie
19th-century writers include Sir Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie, John Galt, Anne Grant, and James Hogg, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Cockburn.
20th-century writers include Catherine Carswell, Robert Garioch, Sorley MacLean, Naomi Mitchison, Edwin Morgan, Willa Muir, Tessa Ransford, and Iain Crichton Smith.

The Hamish Henderson and C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) archives are especially rich resources for correspondence and literary manuscripts sent by other Scottish writers.

Scottish Authors A-Z

As our collections are currently catalogued in varying degrees of detail, the following list cannot claim to be comprehensive. It should, however, provide a useful guide to the most significant literary papers in the collection. For the purposes of this list, 'literature' is defined in traditional terms as works of poetry, prose, drama, and life-writing. Writers of non-imaginative prose (philosophy, history, science, theology, etc.) are thus excluded.

See below for an alphabetical list of over [how many?] Scottish writers represented in our collections.

Sources

In addition to Edinburgh University Library’s own catalogues and finding aids, the following works were consulted when compiling this list:

Index of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700, ed. Peter Beal, 4 vols (London: Mansell, 1980-93)
Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. David C. Sutton, 2 vols (London: British Library, 1995)