For many authors, being forgotten is as cruel a fate as never being read in the first place.

The work of Inverness-born crime fiction pioneer Josephine Tey was widely celebrated during her lifetime, but in the 70 years since her death her star has slipped. Now a programme of re-issues by publishers Penguin aims to redress that, part of a wider process which has pushed a slew of once forgotten or over-looked female novelists – see Anna Kavan, Shirley Jackson, Penelope Fitzgerald, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Octavia Butler etc. – back into the limelight and, in some cases, onto our film and television screens. In that spirit, here is our list of seven Scottish writers whose work deserves a second look, a boost or even a wholesale re-appraisal.

Catherine Carswell

Born Catherine Macfarlane in Glasgow in 1879, she published a controversial biography of Robert Burns in 1930, had a torrid affair with an established painter 17 years her senior and was sacked from the then-Glasgow Herald in 1915 for writing a favourable review of DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow. The pair later became firm friends and she gave Lawrence advice when he was writing Women In Love.

Key works: The semi-autobiographical Open The Door! (1920), set in Edwardian Glasgow, and its follow-up, The Camomile (1922). Entirely ignored at the time, they have since been re-published by Virago Modern Classics

Susan Ferrier

A near contemporary of Jane Austen, who she greatly admired, Ferrier was born in Edinburgh’s Old Town in 1782 and by the time of her third novel in 1831 was receiving hefty advances and seeing her work translated into French. She was admired in turn by her friend Sir Walter Scott and was widely read throughout the 19th century. She fell into neglect in the 20th century, however, but Val McDermid is one modern Scottish writer now championing her.

Key work: Her debut novel Marriage (1818), which was published anonymously. It was the inspiration for a Val McDermid short story projected onto the walls of Edinburgh buildings during the 2017 Hogmanay celebrations

Mrs Oliphant

Born in Wallyford, East Lothian in 1828, Margaret Oliphant Wilson mostly used Mrs Oliphant as her pen name and wrote a vast number of novels between 1849 and her death in 1897 – five in 1883 alone. She also had six children, through only three survived to adulthood. The works veered between historical fiction, domestic realism and tales of the supernatural, and she also wrote for Blackwood’s Magazine on subjects as varied as social science, the law as it related to women and (budding PhD. students take note) nihilism in the work of the Russian author Ivan Turgenev.

Key work: Miss Marjoribanks (1865), one of a series of six novels about life in the fictitious town of Carlingford

Rebecca West

Although born to an adventuring Anglo-Irish father in London in 1892 (he had worked a Confederate stretcher bearer in the American Civil War), Cicily Fairfield grew up in Edinburgh and wrote her first novel as Rebecca West in 1918, taking her pen name from the rebellious heroine in a play by Henrik Ibsen. Many more novels followed, as well as short stories for magazines such as Blast, the famous Vorticist publication. In 1947 Time magazine called her “indisputably the world’s number one woman writer” but she’s best known today for her travel writing and in particular her insightful study of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb And Grey Falcon. Her politics tended towards the radical (she was a feminist, an active suffragette and a defiant anti-fascist) and her private life colourful: she had affairs with HG Wells (definitely) and Charlie Chaplin (probably).

Key works: The Fountain Overflows (1956), This Real Night (1984) and the posthumously published Cousin Rosamund (1985), West’s loose, semi-autobiographical trilogy about the eccentric Aubrey family

Nan Shepherd

A poet as well as a novelist, Shepherd is best known today for The Living Mountain, an impressionistic and weather-infused memoir of her experiences of walking and living in the wild landscape of the Cairngorms. Written in the 1940s but not published until 1977, it was re-published in 2011 by Canongate Books and is a key influence on modern nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane. Born in Cults in 1893, Shepherd was a pioneering Modernist who published three novels between 1928 and 1933, each examining the lives of women and communities in rural Scotland. She was honoured in 2016 when she became the first woman to appear on one of the Bank of Scotland’s main issue notes. If you still carry cash, you’ll find her on the bank’s polymer fiver.

Key work: The Living Mountain (1977)

Jessie Kesson

Born Jessie McDonald in an Inverness workhouse in 1916 and raised in an orphanage, Kesson wrote under her married name and is best known today for her novel about Italian prisoners of war in the Highlands, Another Time, Another Place, filmed by Michael Radford in 1983. She made a living as a farm worker in the north-east until just after the war then moved to London in 1947. Fellow north-east writers Nan Shepherd and Neil M Gunn encouraged and helped her and she later found work with the BBC, writing and producing radio plays and working on Women’s Hour. But it wasn’t until 2016 that a process of re-discovery picked up pace with an exhibition about her life and work at the National Library of Scotland and the re-publication of three of her novels.

Key works: The White Bird Passes (1958), Glitter Of Mica (1963), Another Time, Another Place (1983)

Naomi Mitchison

Born in Edinburgh in 1897 and the sister of biologist JBS Haldane, Mitchison’s 1931 novel The Corn King And The Spring Queen was the first by a Scottish-born author to be added to the Virago Modern Classics list after its foundation in 1975. It was later re-published by Canongate in 1997. Mitchison died at her home in Carradale in 1999 aged 101 and over the course of her life produced around 90 novels spanning genres as varied as travel writing, historical fiction and sci-fi. She continues to be feted as a 20th century Scottish literary great, but there is still much to discover.

Key works: Solution Three (1973), a sci-fi novel set in a post-apocalyptic world and tackling themes from sexuality and over-population to the dangers of genetically modified crops, The Corn King And The Spring Queen (1931), which delves into myth and ritual, The Bull Calves (1947), a historical novel set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising

Read more from this series:
Josephine Tey: the best crime writer you've never heard of