'Who were they'? Recovering Jessie Annie Anderson as a case study of the Scottish Women Poets in Hugh MacDiarmid's Northern Numbers (1920–22)

Of the fourteen women included in Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry anthology, Northern Numbers (1920–22), only four are relatively well known in the reading public’s consciousness and academic scholarship. As for the rest, very little information has been gathered. This essay presents a case study of one of the women in Northern Numbers, Jessie Annie Anderson (1861–1931), who was a prodigious and eclectic working-class poet, writer, magazine editor, and cultural revivalist. Although considered on the fringes of the Scottish Literary Revival, Anderson’s career complicates our understanding of revival as a poet who straddled the rise of the popular penny press in Scotland in the 1880s and the emergence of the Scottish Literary Revival in the 1920s. This essay brings together Anderson’s life, letters, and work in conversation for the first time and re-evaluates her as part of the generation of Scottish women writers for whom literature was a source of income in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.