The cover of the Jonathan Cape edition of Tessa Hadley’s Clever Girl (2013) features a pencil study by James Cowie, titled ‘Schoolgirl’. This study was for Cowie’s painting, A Portrait Group (1940). Coincidentally, the cover of the 1986 Penguin edition of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy, A Scots Quair (1932–4) features a detail from the same work. Although this portrait is presumably meant to suggest Stella, the eponymous ‘clever girl’ of Hadley’s novel, it might equally serve as a portrait of the young Chris Guthrie in A Scots Quair, who is regularly described as cool and reflective.

It is an interesting coincidence, since Tessa Hadley and Lewis Grassic Gibbon are rarely linked in any other context. Their fictions differ in terms of setting, representation of language and narrative technique. There is no sense in which Clever Girl was written in response to Gibbon’s trilogy, it is not imbued with the same Marxist or diffusionist ideology that permeates A Scots Quair, or the same nationalist concerns. Yet, in terms of the representation of female subjectivity and experience, these texts have much in common.

Prompted by these correspondences, this chapter compares Gibbon’s A Scots Quair with Hadley’s novel Clever Girl and two stories from her short story collection, Bad Dreams (2017), exploring the complex subject positions resulting from the intersections of class and gender in the depictions of the female protagonists. I will argue that education contributes to the hybrid subject positions of these protagonists, whose experience, as represented in these respective texts, is characterised by liminality, discontinuity and division. This chapter proposes that the changing social landscape of the twentieth century accounts for the different trajectories of the protagonists. Thus, the texts provide unequalled insights into the experience of the clever girl from a lower-class background over the century.

Together, the timelines of these books include most of the twentieth century, a period of significant social change for women. The changes featured in A Scots Quair, written in the early 1930s and depicting the 1910s and 1920s, are necessarily different from those presented in Clever Girl, but both texts explore issues such as contraception, single motherhood, the shifting class positions of the female protagonists, and education. In addition, both texts take their protagonists from childhood to middle age. Clever Girl begins in Stella’s childhood, setting her personal history against the background of post-Second World War England, and the novel concludes in the early twenty-first century, when she is fifty. The ‘Prelude’ to A Scots Quair starts in prehistory, but Chris’s story begins in 1911, when she is fourteen, and ends in the mid-1930s, when she is about forty.

Gibbon was unusual in selecting a female protagonist for his trilogy. While the ‘clever boy’ is regularly represented in working-class fiction from the 1930s to the 1960s, few texts focused on ‘clever girls’ from the working class or traced their ambiguous relationship to education and the opportunities that are, in theory, afforded by it. The fictions of Gibbon’s contemporaries – Walter Brierley, Lewis Jones and Richard Llewellyn – all focus on the struggles of working-class men against poverty and oppression. Like Huw Morgan in Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley (1939), Chris Guthrie comes from a nation that has suffered from its political relationship to England. Like Huw, she lives in a rural community where education is divisive, and in many cases, disadvantageous, but also, like Huw, she is unusually intelligent and responsive to the English language and literature. However, unlike Huw, Chris is female and her family are crofters rather than working-class in the proletarian sense. Her progress through A Scots Quair – her relationship to education, language, and to the Scottish nation itself – is therefore complicated by gender as well as class.

By contrast, Hadley does not seek to represent national interests, or to engage with any specific political cause. The settings of her novels and short stories are usually domestic. Even so, there are interesting similarities between A Scots Quair and Clever Girl. Most obviously, both authors choose ‘clever girls’ as their protagonists, not least because this cleverness sets them apart from their social backgrounds. Although Hadley uses a first-person narrator, and Gibbon a flexible third, in both texts we see events from the perspectives of these protagonists – that is to say, from a marginalised ‘outsider’ perspective that is often critical or at least ironic and distanced. There are several references, for instance, to Chris’s ‘coolness’ and distance throughout A Scots Quair: ‘And then that went by, she was suddenly cool. It was only a speak, a daft blether of words’ (p. 275). Similarly, as Kate Kellaway notes (2013), Stella herself is always partially withheld, unavailable. At school, Stella is ‘too good at English comprehension for [other] girls to trust’ (Clever Girl, p. 13). She loves her cousins ‘but doesn’t belong to their tribe’ (p. 110). At university, she feels ‘a steely satisfaction in my singleness, as though I was sealed up and made self-sufficient by my work’ (p. 226). And when she ultimately finds work as an occupational therapist, her co-workers find her arrogant and aloof (p. 234).

Hadley, like Gibbon, is critical of education. Stella feels out of place at her own High School. Her first son is born when she is eighteen, and her pregnancy results in her being thrown out of the family home. Later, as a single parent, she becomes a cleaner in a private school, an experience which elicits an ironic dissociation from educational hierarchies: ‘It was only when it was empty that I felt the power of that ideal of gilded, privileged youth. Set apart for a different destiny’ (Clever Girl, p. 136). She works as a waitress while studying for her A levels in the evening, before applying to university, at the age of thirty, by which time she has two children. This is ‘before the big rush of mature students’, so again she feels separate from the other students (p. 225). She is not, like the students at the private school where she previously worked, ‘set apart for a different destiny’, just set apart. The text glosses over the issue of money, but it is likely that in this period, the 1980s, she would have received a government grant. However, her experience of university causes her to feel alienated from both her working-class family and the middle-class academics who fail to impress or inspire her. Her status is both liminal, in the sense of between social classes, and hybrid, combining elements of working- and middle-class experience. Despite her later marriage to a wealthy industrialist, this liminality remains unresolved at the novel’s end.

Gibbon presents education as a tool of imperialistic and class-based oppression which operates specifically through language. Chris’s experience of language is the experience of division: between English, which is the language of social improvement and education, and Scots, which is associated with a rural, deprived economy but also with home and family. Throughout A Scots Quair this linguistic bifurcation manifests itself as a division in her subjective experience:

So that was the college place at Duncairn, two Chrises went there each morning, and one was right douce and studious, and the other sat back and laughed a canny laugh at the antics of the teachers, and minded blawearie Brae, and the champ of horses and the smell of dung, and her father’s brown grained hands, till she was sick to be home again. (p. 45)

At school Chris wins prizes for arithmetic, ‘shines’ at Latin, history and essay writing and is given a bursary to continue at college. But her prospects end when her father can no longer afford the rent on the farm and the family moves to a less tractable croft. This initial misfortune is followed by her mother’s suicide, then the death of her father. On discovering that her father has left money in the bank, Chris’s first thought is that she can ‘go up to the College again, and pass her exams, and go on to Aberdeen, and get her degrees, come out as a teacher and finish with the filthy soss of the farm’ (p. 96), but soon this impulse passes. ‘She walked weeping then, stricken and frightened because of that knowledge that had come on her, she could never leave it, this life of toiling days and the needs of beasts and the smoke of wood fires’ (p. 97).

Alan Bold has written of linguistic division as a key feature of Scottish literature: ‘fiction haunted by history and constantly aware of linguistic division becomes distinctively Scottish when it admits the element of unsettled psychology’ (1983, p. 128). The divisions in Chris’s psychology are referenced throughout A Scots Quair. The first division is between the Scottish and English Chris, but there is also a third Chris who stands apart from the others, who is described as whimsical or uncanny: ‘maybe that third and last Chris would find voice at last for the whimsies that filled her eyes’ (p. 64). This is not the ‘last Chris’ however, since later there are references to many Chrises (p. 297). The initial division, however, is associated with education: ‘So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrises there were that fought for her heart and tormented her’ (p. 37). Education, therefore, is actively disadvantageous to Chris. Likewise, in Clever Girl, Stella is upwardly mobile, but education both facilitates and complicates this trajectory. Her sense of alienation at university leads her to reject an academic career, despite her obvious ability, in favour of a ‘more useful’ career as an occupational therapist (Clever Girl, p. 234). It affects her relationship with her husband, who expects her to listen to him, as if she were ‘the wife of a great philosopher’. However, she reflects, ‘Mac wasn’t a great philosopher, he was a factory owner and it was me who had the humanities degree’ (p. 244). Stella’s education also compounds her difficult relationship with her stepfather, Gerry, who is ‘hostile to the power my education brought me’ (p. 84).

Both protagonists have complex relationships with their fathers. In Sunset Song (the first part of A Scots Quair) Gibbon portrays the incestuous desire of John Guthrie for his daughter, a taboo and controversial subject for that time. In Clever Girl, Stella doesn’t know her real father and spends much of the novel yearning after the unattainable dream of ‘Father’. Stella’s early world is female-centric and marked by a closeness to her mother (a single parent) and grandmother. Men are peripheral at this stage, intruding disastrously and with sporadic violence. Uncle Derek, who has beaten Aunt Andy for many years, and who kills their son, exercises his ‘little despotism’ because of the ‘whole towering, mahogany-coloured, tobacco-smelling, reasonable edifice of male superiority in the world outside’ (Clever Girl, p. 21).

This ‘edifice of male superiority’ is illustrated in both texts by the effects of marriage on the social fortunes of the protagonists. In A Scots Quair, Chris’s social position changes when she marries firstly a crofter, secondly a minister and thirdly a joiner. In Clever Girl, Stella’s fortunes change when her mother marries a factory overseer, and when she herself marries a wealthy industrialist.

Both protagonists are sexually transgressive in terms of the eras in which they live. Chris marries three times, has one sexual encounter with Long Rob while still married and twice kisses a girl. She has two sons in two separate marriages, although one dies shortly after birth. Stella also has two sons to two different partners, marrying later. She initially falls for a young man who is gay, then lives in a commune where sexual fidelity is not the norm. There, she has sexual encounters with two men and one woman.

Both protagonists share an androgynous quality. The name ‘Chris’, is, in itself, androgynous, and Chris’s mother tells her she would ‘make a fine lad’ (Scots Quair, p. 56). Carla Sassi identifies a ‘subtle “androgynous” subtext’ in the trilogy, a ‘cross-gender identification’ that creates ‘a “dislocated” discursive system, whose inherent tensions and ambivalences powerfully subvert contemporary notions of nation and gender identity’ (pp. 116, 133). This is also evident in Clever Girl. Stella dresses to appear more powerful and taller in the mirror (p. 287), and from an early age her self-image is gender-transgressive: ‘I fancied I walked with a masculine casual bravado […]. I wasn’t interested at that point of my life in being girlish’ (p. 29).

This ‘dislocated subversive system’ also applies in A Scots Quair, to Chris’s self-alienated sense of identity, or subjectivity, which is especially evident in the scenes in which she looks at herself in the mirror: ‘Chris took off her clothes in front of that other who watched and moved in the mirror’s mere’ (p. 255). Chris returns to the mirror at moments of change and transition in her social identity, such as her wedding, as if to find a stable point of identification. Deirdre Burton considers the scenes in which Chris reflects on her own image as essential to Gibbon’s portrayal of the split subject (p. 35), which he particularly relates to female experience. While other characters, such as Robert, are shown to be divided between religion and socialism, only Chris is depicted in these mirror scenes which suggest a split in self-perception and subjective awareness of self-as-not-self.

Mirrors are also significant in Clever Girl, where they also signify self-alienation in the same way as in A Scots Quair: ‘I could see my own face as if it wasn’t mine’ (Clever Girl, p. 75). However, on this occasion, the reflected self is also used to signify Stella’s awareness of her own intelligence: ‘This was how I got to know that I was clever’ (p. 75). Stella’s awareness of her reflected self is associated with a sense of power and superiority, whereas Chris’s reflection seems powerless, condemned to extinction:

And so she supposed, behind this newness and those cool eyes in the mirror, the fugitive Chris was imprisoned at last, led in a way like the captives long syne whom men dragged up the heights to Blawearie Lock to streek out and kill by the great grey stones. (Scots Quair, p. 434)

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that ‘our development as individuals is prosecuted as a gradual appropriation of a specific mix of discourses that are capable of best mediating their own intentions’ (p. 36). The ‘mix of discourses’ to which Chris is subject, however – nationality, religion, socialism, class, and gender – are too contradictory for her to appropriate. They appear not to mediate Chris’s intentions, so much as translate her into linguistic terms over which she has no control. Hanne Tange has commented on the range of linguistic registers used in A Scots Quair: ‘As we move from Kinraddie into the worlds of Segget (Cloud Howe) and Duncairn (Grey Granite), Gibbon employs a broader range of linguistic repertoires, expressing through language his narrators’ social identity and status’ (Tange, p. 26). This is exemplified in Cloud Howe when Chris becomes wife to the minister at the Manse:

Others of the choir that had missed a service would say to her with a shy-like smile, I’m so sorry, Mrs. Colquhoun, I was late; and Chris would say that they needn’t fash, if she said it in Scots the woman would think, Isn’t that a common-like bitch at the Manse? If she said it in English the speak would spread round the minister’s wife was putting on airs. (Scots Quair, p. 209)

The ‘linguistic repertoire’ here expresses divisions in gender, nationality and class. As a woman whose class position has altered, Chris now has no appropriate language available to her.

The narrative mode here is Gibbon’s own innovation, ‘the speak’. ‘The speak’ is a uniquely complex and flexible medium, a collective voice, which situates the individual in the context of a divided and conflicted society. It supplies a critical or satirical commentary on various characters, placing them within the community or marking them as outsiders. As the trilogy progresses ‘the speak’ is increasingly critical of Chris. Chris’s own narration slips fluidly between third person and free indirect discourse. As Makiko Minow-Pinkney suggests in her essay on Virginia Woolf, free indirect discourse offers us a subject which has no simple unity, no clear boundary between self and other (p. 157). This complex fluidity renders the subject vulnerable to fragmentation and even disintegration, within the social medium of ‘the speak’.

Hadley’s narrative style is very different, but equally complex. As Sue Vice comments, ‘all of Hadley’s literary effects, including the representation of class, rely on a complex use of voice in an instance of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony, which takes the form of what he calls a “plurality of consciousness”’ (p. 148). Although this ‘plurality of consciousness’ does not resemble Gibbon’s ‘speak’, it does involve subtle shifts between the individual and the collective. As Vice suggests, we frequently cannot establish exactly who is speaking in Hadley’s fictions or determine the nature of the stories’ central event. Hadley also employs a variety of techniques, such as analepsis, prolepsis and shifting narrative frameworks, to suggest the limitations of individual knowledge, and what can be known.

In ‘An Abduction’, for instance, the first story in Hadley’s collection, Bad Dreams, a fifteen-year-old girl, Jane, gets into a car with a group of boys. She has sex with one of them, Daniel, whom she later discovers in bed with another girl. She retreats into the garden, where one of the other boys says to her: ‘So now you know’ (Bad Dreams, p. 25). ‘But what does Jane know,’ Rosemary Rizq asks, and ‘what is the nature of the knowledge that she has acquired?’ (p. 10). The narrator doesn’t answer these questions, so the reader encounters a narrative gap that ‘reminds us of the instability of our organised schemes of knowledge’ (p. 23). In a similar way, Gibbon also draws attention to what Chris cannot know. On her wedding night, for instance, Chris wants to ask Mistress Mutch ‘something’, but doesn’t know how (Scots Quair, p. 127). Throughout the trilogy the ‘third Chris’ perceives what cannot be known or put into words. But the moment when Chris walks weeping and frightened, because she knows finally that she cannot leave the land, is an illustration of what Rizq terms cataleptic knowledge, in which something fundamental, and inescapable is perceived. Similarly, in ‘An Abduction’, Jane undergoes a process of maturation in which she moves from unknowing to knowing, by venturing into the unknown. This essential, cataleptic knowledge operates irrespective of intelligence or education (we are told, in fact, on the first page of ‘An Abduction’, that Jane is not a ‘clever girl’), but in both texts it drives the narratives.

Hadley describes the process of maturation as a ‘fated trek towards adulthood’ (Bad Dreams, p. 4). In this ‘fated trek’, Rizq suggests, Jane is both particularised and representative: ‘For just as Freud wanted to find something in the singularity and distinctiveness of his psychoanalytic case histories that could answer to a more general frame of reference, so too Hadley is concerned to find something within the particularity of her tale that speaks to us all’ (Ellmann, cited in Rizq, p. 22). Like Gibbon, therefore, Hadley creates characters who represent something larger than themselves. Although the effect is achieved differently in A Scots Quair, many critics have commented on the fact that Chris is both individualised and mythopoeic, representative of the Scottish nation. Glenda Norquay has written about her (not unproblematic) identification with the Scottish nation (p. 80). This mode of characterisation allows the text to be read on multiple levels and permits the reader to both acknowledge and participate in the ‘fated trek’ of the protagonist.

It is particularly evident in the title story of Hadley’s collection, Bad Dreams, which deals explicitly with a ‘clever girl’ who is younger than Jane, on the cusp of childhood and adolescence. The story itself is deceptively simple. A child wakes up in the middle of the night. She has had a bad dream about the book she’s been reading – Swallows and Amazons – which is not, in itself, a scary story. She gets out of bed and goes into the lounge, where, on an unexplained impulse she upends the furniture. When her mother sees this, she initially assumes they have been burgled. Her second thought is that her husband must have done it in a moment of anger against her. Her immediate response is to act as if nothing happened.

In this story, Hadley prompts us towards a symbolic reading by not naming her protagonists. Only the fictional characters from Swallows and Amazons are named, the actual protagonists of the story are referred to as ‘the child’, ‘the child’s mother’, ‘the husband’. The absence of naming contributes to the sense that Hadley is describing not only a particularised child in a specific family, but an archetypal process of growing up into a gendered version of ‘reality’. The anonymity contrasts with the specificity of the period detail – the appliqué, the perfume L’Air du Temps all of which is suggestive of an aspirational middle-class family. The precision creates a textured, tangible world, as though we are in the realm of social realism, but the narrative shifts quickly, almost imperceptibly, into surreality, blurring the lines between fiction, reality, fantasy, play, memory and imagination. In Swallows and Amazons, six children play together, pushing across thresholds in the natural world into the unknown. It is a classic children’s book, not fantasy like the Narnia stories, although it is not, strictly speaking, social realism either. It offers a parallel dimension to the child’s world. The child dreams about this fictional world, which offers a third dimension of reality. Specifically, she dreams about the children from Swallows and Amazons growing up. There is an especial focus on Susan, whom the child perceives as the dullest of all the children. In her dream, Susan grows into old age, and the fear this provokes in the child may be her response to an awareness that the world of childhood must end. There seems to be a parallel in the child’s mind between Susan and her mother. Her mother lives a routine, domestic life, although she wanted to be an artist. In her role as mother, however, she suppresses the child’s imaginative world, taking the book from her.

The child does not conform to gender expectations. When she spends too much time in the bathroom it is because she is reading and immersed in her fictional world, rather than grooming (she is described as ‘scruffy’). Her action of upending the domestic furniture can be read as her attempt to disrupt a pre-written narrative of gendered expectations. By this action, the child engages with shaping reality, as she could be said to ‘author’ her dream. The child inhabits more than one kind of reality because she has not yet been trammelled into a female role. It could be said that she occupies ‘fragmented, hybrid subject positions’ (Roy, p. 78) between childhood and adulthood, waking and sleeping, fiction and ‘reality’. ‘Reality’ in this story is unreliable and contingent. There is a destabilisation of narrative framing, and an interrogation of identity, particularly female identity. The moment when ‘the mother’ corrects her image in a mirror suggests a social construction of identity, and a socialised gaze.

Like many of Hadley’s fictions, ‘Bad Dreams’ is set in the 1960s. The female role, or domestic narrative which the child disrupts, is period-specific, so the story suggests a change in the construction of female identity across the generations.

Some of the techniques used in Hadley’s short stories are also employed in her novel, Clever Girl, where the use of a first-person narrative creates the impression that Stella ‘owns’ her own story, as Chris Guthrie does not. However, Hadley highlights the limitations of the first-person narrative. In the earliest sections of the book, for instance, there is a focus on what the child protagonist can’t know, the gap between what is told to her by adults and what she learns later: ‘My father was supposed to be dead, and I only found out years later that he’d left’ (Clever Girl, p. 1). The continuity of the narrative, taking Stella through various phases of her life, is interrupted or disrupted by her urge to escape from social expectations of class and gender. Her urge to escape is described as a ‘switch flicking between two different versions of herself’ (p. 185). She describes this urge as ‘anarchic and destructive’ (p. 187). She leaves her son, takes her friend’s car, and ‘does a runner’. But she associates it also with strength: ‘And yet I felt this strength like a knife inside me, anarchic and destructive, able to cut through whatever outward forms of authority I met’ (pp. 187–8). Like the ‘clever girl’ in ‘Bad Dreams’, Stella disrupts the narrative prescribed for her.

Like Chris in A Scots Quair, Stella has several intersecting identities. She is a working-class child, a single mother, a cleaner, a member of a commune, a mature student, an occupational therapist and a wife. Like Chris, she is not defined by any of them. She retains a sense of her own separateness, which is preserved in her ‘runners’. She escapes initially to her childhood friend Madeleine, then to more anonymous destinations, to a guesthouse where she gets ill, and on one occasion, contracts a sexually transmitted disease. Stella cannot explain her urge to run, which frightens her: ‘I was always frightened, all the time I was running away’ (Clever Girl, p. 200), except to say she ‘isn’t responsible’. She cannot find the words to describe what she wants from them: ‘If I was free, If I was just me, then what was I? What could I do; what could I become?’ (p. 201).

Chris also yearns for escape, although the awareness that this isn’t possible, that she is bound to the land, supersedes (Scots Quair, pp. 97 and 429). In both texts the awareness of a fugitive self is associated with alienation: ‘And now she stood by a stranger’s side, she slept in his bed’ (p. 207). In Clever Girl, Stella and Mac, her husband, seem like ‘strangers joined by meaningless accident, unfathomable to one another’, and everything in her life seems ‘too far off and too tiny’ (Clever Girl, p. 267). Chris’s third husband, Ake, senses a quality in her that he cannot control or possess, ‘Ay, a strange quean, yon, and not for him: “He’d thought that glimmer in her eyes a fire that he himself could blow to a flame; and instead ’twas no more than the shine of a stone”’ (Scots Quair, p. 487). Stella’s third partner, Mac, also senses something untameable in her: ‘I guessed then that you were a little savage, a revolutionary’ (Clever Girl, p. 209). In Clever Girl, this quality is associated with class. Men are consistently attracted to Stella’s working-class roots, yet Stella is resistant to the definition: ‘Aren’t I middle-class?’, she says to one man (p. 90). This might suggest a certain naïveté, but also, perhaps, that her social position, like Chris’s, is too complex for any simple linguistic or class-based terminology.

In both texts the unconfined, unsocial quality of the protagonist surfaces in the closing paragraphs: ‘Some dark shape – a cat or a fox – flows across the road for an instant ahead of us, then disappears into a hedge. I switch on the headlights and the car leaps forward into the night’ (Clever Girl, p. 309). In the final paragraph of A Scots Quair, Chris: ‘sat on as one by one the lights went out and the rain came beating the stones about her, and falling all that night while she still sat there, feeling no longer the touch of the rain or the sound of the lapwings going by’ (p. 496). These closing words are frequently interpreted as referring to Chris’s death, since they suggest an absolute passivity and loss of self. By contrast, the closing words of Clever Girl suggest agency. Stella is driving, which she loves, and taking a literal leap into the dark. Both texts describe this fugitive self as mysterious, semi-conscious, inarticulable. In A Scots Quair it is presented as mystical, fey or uncanny, whereas in Clever Girl it is anarchic and disruptive. Yet it is possible to see this mysterious ‘other self’ as constituted by the discourses of class, gender and economics, in the same ways as the social identities of the protagonists. The different trajectories and outcomes of their narratives can be accounted for by the social changes in the time periods represented in the texts.

In British Working-Class Fiction, Roberto del Valle Alcalá writes about the socialisation of labour as one of the key effects of post-war capitalism. This socialisation has encouraged fewer differentiations in gender-assigned work, a ‘fundamental levelling of pre-existing qualitative distinctions’ (pp. 49–50), which in turn has permitted forms of autonomy and resistance in the subjective experience of working-class women. In novels such as Poor Cow (1967) by Nell Dunn and Blow Your House Down by Pat Barker (1984), there is an increasing ‘articulation of agency’ (p. 52) and a ‘vindication of subjective areas of autonomy’. Del Valle Alcalá contrasts this with the ‘obliteration’ of female characters that he finds in the fictions of Sillitoe and Storey, although, he stresses that there is no ‘fully realized emancipation’ in the novels by Barker and Dunn. In fact, he says: ‘the women inhabiting these pages are compelled to forms of resistance that are often ambiguous, contradictory and self-defeating’ (p. 74). However, he describes their capacity for ‘rupture and innovation’ as a form of resistance, that ‘soon develops, in the context of neoliberal society, into a fully-fledged dynamic of subjective transformation’ (p. 133).

A similar comparison can be made between the protagonists of A Scots Quair and Clever Girl. Significant opportunities are available to Stella as a result of developments in post-war capitalism. She can choose a profession, drive, access further education and birth control. None of these, however, leads to full emancipation – Stella’s sense of autonomy, her social status, are dependent on certain support granted by men and by the various characters who help her to look after her two sons. At the end of the novel her social position is not easily defined. She has completed a degree but decided against an academic career. After marrying a wealthy man, she works part-time and does not feel she belongs in the country house where they live. She frequently regrets her marriage and still feels a need for her ‘runners’. Her social position seems both hybrid and liminal; she fully belongs to no class but feels most power when using her credit card (Clever Girl, p. 251). She feels set apart from other women; however, when her aunt confides that she has also done ‘runners’, Hadley suggests a commonality of female experience that is almost absent from A Scots Quair. Despite her three marriages and her son, Chris, throughout the trilogy, seems unsupported and alone. Her relationships with women are fleetingly close and warm but they are disrupted by men, or by death. Ultimately, Stella is able to participate more fully in her society and in more ways than Chris. There seems to be no place, in the world of A Scots Quair, for the clever girl.

In summary then, these two texts offer an invaluable insight into the experience of the ‘clever girl’ through a century of radical change. The connection between the two covers seems to advertise a certain relationship between the texts, however any similarities may be accounted for by the fact that both writers reflect the social changes affecting women in the twentieth century through the lens of the subjective experience of their protagonists. It is unlikely that Hadley was consciously responding to Gibbon’s work, but she is equally sensitive to the key issues of gender and class, motherhood, contraception and education as they are experienced by her principal female character. These issues persist throughout the twentieth century and are only partially resolved by the political changes represented in these fictions. Both Hadley and Gibbon reveal the limitations of social and political change with regard to women. The radical changes that do occur in the timeframes of their respective novels correspond to shifts, fragmentation and discontinuities within the characters themselves. While the possibility of education for the working-class woman is often viewed as one of the most progressive changes of the twentieth century, for instance, both writers demonstrate how the emancipation it offers may be illusory or incomplete. It is shown, in fact, to contribute to the liminality, hybridity and discontinuity of female subjective experience. Education does, however, along with other social and political developments of the later twentieth century, allow Stella, like the ‘clever girl’ in ‘Bad Dreams’, to intervene in the narrative prescribed for her in various creative and disruptive ways. Stella’s first-person narration, while demonstrating a limited and incomplete cognisance, also suggests a developing subjectivity that identifies itself separately from the larger narratives of class and nationhood. At the end of Clever Girl, Stella’s position is hybrid and liminal with respect to class and gender, but she is not without agency, or a voice. By contrast Chris, in the earlier part of the twentieth century, remains deeply embedded in the social discourses of class, nationhood, gender and religion, and is apparently subsumed by them. Unable to find an adequate reflection of herself in either language or society, or to create a sustaining narrative from the contradictory social discourses within which she is embedded, she lapses into silence at the end.