Asked in a 2011 interview whether he considered any woman writer his equal, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul scoffed. ‘[I]nevitably for a woman,’ he said, ‘she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.’ He went on to take aim at Jane Austen’s ‘sentimental sense of the world’ and at his publisher Diana Athill, whose work he described as ‘all this feminine tosh.’

There was a predictable outcry in response (Athill had her own revenge in her memoirs), but Naipaul’s comments are useful in laying bare the sort of reasoning that keeps women’s writing down.

Elena Ferrante, author of international sensation My Brilliant Friend, agrees that, ‘courage to go through the world fighting with words and deeds, street by street, remains in many people’s imagination the province of male intellectuals. Women, meanwhile, are still assigned to the balcony, from where they may contemplate life passing by and describe it in tremulous words.’

Here in Scotland, our literary women have understood these tensions very well. The seventeenth-century Gaelic poet Mary MacLeod (Màiri Nighean Alasdair Ruaidh) was born in Rodel in Harris and spent her life in Dunvegan in Skye, working in the nursery of her clan chief.

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While at Dunvegan, tradition tells us that she composed her work on the threshold of the door, having no place either inside in the women’s tradition of lullabies and worksongs, or outside making political poems among the men. After a poem criticising her chief and praising a rival, Mary spent some time exiled on the small island of Scarba, across the Corryvreckan whirlpool from Jura. She did eventually return to favour, although tradition also has it that when she died she was buried face-down, as the Norse disposed of a witch.

The assumption that women writing about the domestic sphere automatically results in unimportant work perhaps explains the many gaps we find when we look for Scotland’s women writers in history. In the era of Jane Austen, we had Susan Ferriers, Mary Brunton, Elizabeth Hamilton and Catherine Sinclair, among others. They were best-sellers in their day – Brunton and Hamilton out-sold Austen - and highly regarded early novelists, but little of their work is available today.

Similarly out of print now are works by the many Scottish women writers of the early and mid-twentieth century, although the Canongate Classics and Virago Classics imprints of the 1990s did put many back into circulation. Reissued work by Catherine Carswell, Nancy Bryson Morrison, Naomi Mitchison, Elspeth Davie and Willa Muir gives the lie to the idea that women cannot create work of scale and ambition. Mitchison, for example, took on Celtic, Hellenic and Byzantine history, Jacobitism, modern politics and more (she was also a political campaigner, corresponded with dozens of writers including Stevie Smith and W. H. Auden, and smuggled letters out of Nazi territories in her knickers in the 1930s).

The centenary of Muriel Spark in 2018 saw her full oeuvre made available again for a new generation to discover. A few years previously, the Aberdeen writer Nan Shepherd was rediscovered, or at least her 1944 work The Living Mountain was (it wasn’t published until 1977, in a small run by Aberdeen University Press). Today Shepherd is something of a darling of the literary scene, having been on the RBS £5 note, loaning her name to a nature writing prize, and being cited as an influence by Robert MacFarlane, Richard Mabey and other key nature writers.

Naomi MitchisonNaomi Mitchison (Image: free) Sadly, her broader work including a trio of modernist novels exploring the conflicts between tradition and modernity in women’s lives in rural Scotland have not been resurrected, although these have been compared with Woolf and belong to the same tradition as Grassic Gibbon’s much-beloved Scots Quair. (Grassic Gibbon never seems to suffer from writing about a woman, but then he was a man).

Of Shepherd, reviewer Nicholas Lezard cheerfully announced that he picked up The Living Mountain despite her name - ‘what kind of a serious writer calls herself “Nan”?’ Misogyny is even better with a side of class snobbery.

The picture is brighter for women writing in Scotland today. To mention just a few, novelists Ali Smith, Anne Donovan, A. L. Kennedy, Dilys Rose, Val McDermid, Denise Mina and Manda Scott, poets Jackie Kay, Carol Ann Duffy, Jenni Fagan (also a novelist) and newer voices including Heather Parry, Kirsty Logan and Rachelle Attala illustrate the breadth of work coming out of Scotland. Children’s books are also bursting with talent, Elle McNicoll perhaps the queen of the crop right now.

There’s also a strong appetite for books exploring history from the female perspective. Writers including Sara Sheridan, Sally Magnusson, Lucy Ribchester, Sue Lawrence, Kate Foster and many more set out to reimagine what has been lost.

I’ve done the same in my new book The Specimens, which explores the West Port Murders of Burke and Hare through the lives of five women connected to the case. Only one of these women is remembered in any detail today – Helen MacDougal, Burke’s woman, who stood trial with him for her life – and the record is imperfect.

The Specimens is published by Black & White PublishingThe Specimens is published by Black & White Publishing (Image: free) Of the other four I chose – the wife of the anatomist Robert Knox and a salt-seller, a cinder gatherer and a probably itinerant woman who fell victim to the killers - the historical record has preserved little more than their names. For some of the other victims, we do not even know that. I believe it is important to remember them, not least because the conditions that led to their deaths – mass movement of people, discrimination and wealth inequality – remain with us today.

In telling women’s stories, writers hope to remind readers that women came before us, as well as men, and they too were clever, talented, ambitious, and indeed vicious and venal, their vulnerabilities and experiences different but no less important than those of men. We need to read about them if we wish to understand where we really come from, and we need to read the words of women who have gone before us to understand how they understood the world.

My own publisher, Black and White, has reissued Jessie Kesson, Persephone Books has rediscovered D. E. Stevenson, and Chawton House Library, the Association for Scottish Literary Studies and others are beginning to reissue our women’s work. These works are treats for any reader and here’s to shelves more of them in future.

The Specimens, is published by Black & White Publishing, hardback, £16.99