Shetland

Drawing on letters and her Diaries, this chapter treats Edith’s 1901 summer in Shetland. There she plunged into local life and collected stories much as she had in Barra. She was much helped in her researches by Laurence Williamson (1855–1936), an amateur scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of Shetland’s language, culture, and history. She expected to incorporate stories she heard into stories of her own, but she soon found them coalescing into what became The Reaper (1904). Publishers initially considered Reaper too highbrow for the reading public, but reviews were excellent. Edith had found her finest voice.