Agnes Owens: The Complete Short Stories

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This nameless secondary character exemplifies the way in which the powerful tend to be associated with the masculine while the vulnerable tend to be associated with the feminine.

It is easy to overlook the marginalized in real life because they are a minority and because society seems to keep them at a safe distance but they people Owens’s fiction and refuse to be silenced. The family continued to live as best they could with her sons following their father’s profession and Agnes finding work as a cleaner. Then from the wood there was a crack as if someone or something had stood on a branch while he or it was watching me. One of the most terrible scenes is probably the assault of the middle-aged, amnesiac woman who has escaped from her mental institution in “People Like That”.There then followed more than a year of itinerant living, walking from town to town seeking work and sleeping in a two-man tent or in derelict buildings. The family was poor, but not uncommonly so and, despite Owens being described as a “hopeless case” at school, they insisted she go to college to learn typing. The second part – devoted to the victimization of women – will therefore be followed by an analysis of their rebellion and of Owens’s fiction as an act of insurrection. The snag was, I had to be obedient, well mannered and speak with a proper accent which was the hardest thing to do.

In the same interview, Owens reminds us that “the underdog can turn round and bite you just the same as any other dog! Always on the verge of extinction, the Tramp is a tiny parasitic creature, a precarious witness who cannot alter the world but can bear witness to its frailty and give visibility to the vulnerable.They interrupt the narrators, demand further information about secondary characters, see the men portrayed as villains as gentlemen, etc. Dixon, Keith “Talking to the People: A Reflection on Recent Glasgow Fiction”, in Studies in Scottish Literature , vol. There was a determination to bring to fiction the unimagined: voices, people and places denied cultural existence” (Stark 111). I remember thinking as the afternoon wore on, the room grew darker, and the rain fell heavier, that there was enough material for a brilliant memoir.

Through her meta-fictional comments on the precariousness involved in the transmission of one’s story, Owens appeals to our response-ability as readers to engage fully with her works and see the characters who – within the diegesis – are denied visibility.

When read in isolation, her short stories and novellas are stories of defeat yet, once they are read together and allowed to resonate with each other, they depict the insurrection of small, invisible lives and engage our response-ability as readers.

a book about poor unemployed drunkards that manages to be incredibly funny yet not condescending or nasty.Passing through Yorkshire and Durham he paid a brief visit to the Farne Islands in a coble – ‘a hazardous species of boat’ – entering Scotland at.