‘Lost’ book by Scottish writer published thanks to University of St Andrews team

Some 53 years after the death of the renowned feminist author, The Usurpers has now been published thanks to Colenso Books and the university’s special collections team.

The Usurpers is set in Prague in the late 1940s as Czechoslovakia was just starting to recover from German occupation during the Second World War. The characters in the novel are mainly based on real people and real situations and the insidious influence of the Communist Party, which culminated in the coup of February 1948.

Two typed versions of the manuscript for the novel have been in the university’s special collections since the 1970s, along with the rest of Willa’s papers, and remained unpublished.

Jim Potts, who undertook editing of the novel, was director of the British Council in Prague from 1986-1989, in the final years of the Communist regime, so the Muirs’ experiences resonated with him. He met people who had known them in the 1940s, and his interest in Willa brought him to St Andrews special collections in 2013. Almost a decade later, the book has seen the light of day thanks to Jim and Anthony Hirst, publisher at Colenso Books.

Willa Muir was a student at the university from 1907-1911, when Minnie Anderson – as she was then known – gained a first-class degree in Classics. She married the poet Edwin Muir in 1919 and the couple led a peripatetic life around Europe, subsisting by teaching, writing, and translating.

Rachel Hart, head of archives and rare books and keeper of manuscripts and muniments at the university, said: “The appearance in print for the first time of an unpublished manuscript is always exciting. Both handwritten and typescript versions of Willa Muir’s The Usurpers are held with her archive in the university and this is a great opportunity to raise the profile of an early female graduate who was an exemplary student.”

Copies of The Usurpers are available through the Wardlaw Museum shop and in Topping & Company Booksellers, St Andrews.