Tales of the Wars of Montrose

James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both Scots and English. He is best known for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Gillian Hughes, Independent Scholar, has been a General Editor of the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg, and is currently an advisory editor for the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry and for the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. She has published critical editions of works by each of these writers, and also a biography of James Hogg.

Tales of the Wars of Montrose, too, though held together by internal connections and the common historical context, displays a similar delight in literary form, beginning with the conscious imitation of Defoe, ‘Some Remarkable Passages in the Life of an Edinburgh Baillie Written by himself’. The dates and details of the opening narrative (admirably glossed by Gillian Hughes) enable Hogg to follow Defoe in exploring the relationship between literature and history, truth and fiction, while also creating a foundation for the subsequent tales of romantic intrigue, Ossianic tragedy, adventure and vendetta all over Scotland. It is hard to imagine a tale less like the Edinburgh Baillie’s memoirs than that of ‘Sir Simon Brodie’, whose quixotic adventures include being thrown overboard in the Firth of Forth by the Duke of Argyll and rescued from his predicament by an amorous seal