130 Years
Walter Scott and Secret History
Thursday 1st June 2023
Hilary Clydesdale is an AHRC-funded PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. In her thesis, titled Secrecy, Surveillance and Counterintelligence in the Prose Fiction of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, Hilary explores the relationship between domestic forms of secrecy and the narrative structure of the nineteenth-century historical novel, and she traces this connection to the changing landscape of Scottish historicism throughout the century. At the centre of her research, Hilary draws attention to the importance of Secret History in the development of nineteenth-century literature, from 1814 to 1894, by highlighting its nuanced role in the historical novels of Walter Scott (1771–1832) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). Hilary also has a keen interest in Walter Scott’s narrative poetry and she has written an article, published in Scottish Literary Review, analysing the complex relationship between poetic form and historical structure in Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.
Synopsis: In her lecture, ‘Walter Scott and Secret History’, Hilary Clydesdale draws attention to the nuanced and complicated relationship Scott forges between secrecy and the publication of historical narratives. She begins by looking to the historical origins of the genre of Secret History, before moving into an examination of Scott’s own
Secret History of the Court of James the First, published in two volumes in 1811. Hilary argues that, as a proponent of Secret History, Scott’s fascination with the genre informs his approach to composing, and constructing, his historical novels. Then, having traced Scott’s fascination with exploring and troublingly the boundaries between private, domestic secrets and public history in both his non-fiction and fiction work, she concludes by drawing attention to the way that Scott contributes to a distinctly nineteenth-century evolution of Secret History, not only as its author, but also as its subject.
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