The novel in Scotland includes all long prose fiction published in Scotland and by Scottish authors since the development of the literary format in the eighteenth century. The novel was soon a major element of Scottish literary and critical life. Tobias Smollett's picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle mean that he is often seen as Scotland's first novelist. Other Scots who contributed to the development of the novel in the eighteenth century include Henry Mackenzie and John Moore.
There was a tradition of moral and domestic fiction in the early nineteenth century that included the work of Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton and Christian Johnstone. The outstanding literary figure of the early nineteenth century was Walter Scott, whose Waverley is often called the first historical novel. He had a major worldwide influence. His success led to a publishing boom in Scotland. Major figures that benefited included James Hogg, John Galt, John Gibson Lockhart, John Wilson and Susan Ferrier. In the mid-nineteenth century major literary figures that contributed to the development of the novel included David Macbeth Moir, John Stuart Blackie, William Edmondstoune Aytoun and Margaret Oliphant. In the late nineteenth century, a number of Scottish-born authors achieved international reputations, including Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories helped found the tradition of detective fiction. In the last two decades of the century the "kailyard school" (cabbage patch) depicted Scotland in a rural and nostalgic fashion, often seen as a "failure of nerve" in dealing with the rapid changes that had swept across Scotland in the industrial revolution. Figures associated with the movement include Ian Maclaren, S. R. Crockett and J. M. Barrie, best known for his creation of Peter Pan, which helped develop the genre of fantasy, as did the work of George MacDonald.
Among the most important novels of the early twentieth century was The House with the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown, which broke with the Kailyard tradition. John Buchan played a major role in the creation of the modern thriller with The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. The Scottish literary Renaissance attempted to introduce modernism into art and create of a distinctive national literature. It increasingly focused on the novel. Major figures included Neil Gunn, George Blake, A. J. Cronin, Eric Linklater and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. There were also a large number of female authors associated with the movement, who included Catherine Carswell, Willa Muir, Nan Shepherd and Naomi Mitchison. Many major Scottish post-war novelists, such as Robin Jenkins, Jessie Kesson, Muriel Spark, Alexander Trocchi and James Kennaway spent most of their lives outside Scotland, but often dealt with Scottish themes. Successful mass-market works included the action novels of Alistair MacLean and the historical fiction of Dorothy Dunnett. A younger generation of novelists that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s included Allan Massie, Shena Mackay and Alan Spence. Working class identity continued to be explored by Archie Hind, Alan Sharp, George Friel and William McIlvanney.
From the 1980s Scottish literature enjoyed another major revival, with figures including Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Janice Galloway, A. L. Kennedy, Iain Banks, Candia McWilliam, Frank Kuppner and Andrew O'Hagan. In genre fiction Iain Banks, writing as Iain M. Banks, produced ground-breaking science fiction and Scottish crime fiction has been a major area of growth with the success of novelists including Frederic Lindsay, Quintin Jardine, Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyre, and particularly Ian Rankin and his Inspector Rebus novels.
Eighteenth century
The novel in its modern form developed rapidly in the eighteenth century and was soon a major element of Scottish literary and critical life. There was a demand in Scotland for the newest novels including Robinson Crusoe (1719), Pamela (1740), Tom Jones (1749) and Evelina (1788). There were weekly reviews of novels in periodicals, the most important of which were The Monthly Review and The Critical Review. Lending libraries were established in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Private manor libraries were established in estate houses. The universities began to acquire novels and they became part of the curriculum.P. G. Bator, "The entrance of the novel into the Scottish universities", in R. Crawford, ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), , pp. 89–90. By the 1770s about thirty novels were being printed in Britain and Ireland every year and there is plentiful evidence that they were being read, particularly by women and students in Scotland. Scotland and Scottish authors made a modest contribution to this early development. About forty full length prose books were printed in Scotland before 1800. One of the earliest was the anonymously authored Select Collection of Oriental Tales (1776).
Tobias Smollett (1721–71) was a poet, essayist, satirist and playwright, but is best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) for which he is often seen as Scotland's first novelist.J. C. Beasley, Tobias Smollett: Novelist (University of Georgia Press, 1998), , p. 1. His most influential novel was his last, the epistolary novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771).R. Crawford, Scotland's Books: a History of Scottish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), , p. 316. His work would be a major influence on later novelists such as Thackeray and Dickens.R. Crawford, Scotland's Books: a History of Scottish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), , p. 313. Other eighteenth-century novelists included Henry Mackenzie (1745–1821), whose major work The Man of Feeling (1771) was a sentimental novel dealing with human emotions, influenced by Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne and the thinking of philosopher David Hume. His later novels, The Man of the World (1773) and Julia de Roubigné (1777) were set in the wilds of America and in France respectively, with the character of the title of the latter being the first female protagonist throughout a Scottish novel.R. Crawford, Scotland's Books: a History of Scottish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), , pp. 321–3. Physician John Moore's novel Zeluco (1789) focused on an anti-hero, the Italian nobleman of the title, and was a major influence on the work of Byron.R. Crawford, Scotland's Books: a History of Scottish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), , p. 392.
Nineteenth century As elsewhere in the British Isles there was a tradition of moral and domestic fiction in the early nineteenth century. It did not flourish to the same extent in Scotland, but did produce a number of significant publications. These included Elizabeth Hamilton's (1756?–1816), Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), Mary Brunton's (1778–1818) Discipline (1814) and Christian Johnstone's Clan-Albin (1815).I. Duncan, "Scott and the historical novel: a Scottish rise of the novel", in G. Carruthers and L. McIlvanney, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2012), , p. 105.
The outstanding literary figure of the early nineteenth century was Walter Scott (1771–1832). Having begun as a ballad collector and poet, his first prose work, Waverley in 1814, often called the first historical novel, launched a highly successful career as a novelist.K. S. Whetter, Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), , p. 28. His first nine novels dealt with Scottish history, particularly of the Highlands and Borders and included Rob Roy (1817) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818). Beginning with Ivanhoe (1820) he turned to English history and began the European vogue for his work. He was created a baronet by George IV in 1820, the first literary figure to receive the honour. His work helped to solidify the respectability of the novel as literatureG. L. Barnett, ed., Nineteenth-Century British Novelists on the Novel (Ardent Media, 1971), p. 29. and did more than any other figure to define and popularise Scottish cultural identity in the nineteenth century.N. Davidson, The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (Pluto Press, 2008), , p. 136. He is considered the first novelist writing in English to enjoy an international career in his own lifetime,R. H. Hutton, Sir Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), , p. 1. having a major influence on novelists in Italy, France, Russia and the US as well as Great Britain.
Scott's success led to a publishing boom in Scotland that benefited his imitators and rivals. Scottish publishing increased threefold as a proportion of all publishing in Great Britain, reaching a peak of 15 per cent in 1822–25. Many novels were originally serialised in periodicals which included The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, and Blackwood's Magazine, founded in 1817, both of which were owned by Scott's publisher Blackwoods. Together they had a major impact on the development of British literature in the era of Romanticism, helping to solidify the literary respectability of the novel.A. Jarrels, "'Associations respect[ing] the past': Enlightenment and Romantic historicism", in J. P. Klancher, A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), , p. 60.A. Benchimol, ed., Intellectual Politics and Cultural Conflict in the Romantic Period: Scottish Whigs, English Radicals and the Making of the British Public Sphere (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), , p. 210.
The major figures that benefited from this boom included James Hogg (1770–1835), whose best known work is The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which dealt with the themes of Presbyterian religion and Satanic possession, evoking the landscape of Edinburgh and its surrounding environment.A. Maunder, FOF Companion to the British Short Story (Infobase Publishing, 2007), , p. 374. John Galt's (1779–1839) most famous work was Annals of the Parish (1821), given in the form of a diary kept by a rural minister over a fifty-year period and allowing Galt to make observations about the changes in Scottish society.I. Campbell, "Culture: Enlightenment (1660–1843): the novel", in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), , pp. 138–40. Walter Scott's son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854), is most noted for his Life of Adam Blair (1822) which focuses on the contest between desire and guilt. The lawyer and critic John Wilson, as Christopher North, published novels including Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822), The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay (1823) and The Foresters (1825), which investigate individual psychology.G. Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), , p. 320. The only major female novelist to emerge in the aftermath of Scott's success was Susan Ferrier (1782–1854), whose novels Marriage (1818), The Inheritance (1824) and Destiny (1831), continued the domestic tradition.
In the mid-nineteenth century major literary figures that contributed to the development of the novel included David Macbeth Moir (1798–1851), John Stuart Blackie (1809–95) and William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813–65). Margaret Oliphant (1828–97) produced over a hundred novels, many of them historical or studies of manners set in Scotland and England, including The Minister's Wife (1886) and Kirsteen (1890). Her series the Chronicles of Carlingford has been compared with the best work of Anthony Trollope.A. C. Cheyne, "Culture: Age of Industry (1843–1914), general", in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), , pp. 143–6.