It’s August and the Edinburgh festival is upon us back to its raucous self, more or less, following two years of enforced, relative quiet. 2022 is the 75th anniversary of the Edinburgh International Festival. It is also seventy-five years since eight theatre groups who were not invited to participate in the International Festival turned up […]
Eric Blair becomes George Orwell
When we were deciding who to include in the National Library of Scotland’s current exhibition ‘Pen names’ we had to be selective. Many authors have used pen names in the United Kingdom in the period covered by the exhibition, 1800 to the present day, but we could only include forty. We decided on criteria for […]
A potted history of pen names
A pen name is a literary alias: a variation of a writer’s birth or married name or a completely invented pseudonym. The Library’s exhibition ‘Pen Names’ takes a thematic approach to the subject, looking at how factors such as privacy, gender, reputation, authenticity, and genre have influenced writers’ decision to use a pen name from […]
Refugee Week at the National Library — Sound and Voice
Scotland has three official languages, but countless others have echoed through its streets and floated over its airwaves. From poetry to protest chants, the speech and song of the immigrants and refugees who have made their homes in Scotland have enriched the soundtrack of Scottish life. Pause for a moment to imagine the long-gone soundscape […]
Scottish South Asian Voices in Broadcasting
Over the last six months as an intern at the National Library of Scotland, I have undertaken the project ‘Scottish South Asians in Broadcasting’. This project draws on the Library’s vast collections, particularly the Moving Image Archive and Sound Collections, to identify underrepresented stories relating to the South Asian contribution to broadcasting in Scotland. The […]
A Natural Treasure
Isobel Wylie Hutchison features in our ‘Treasures of the National Library of Scotland’ exhibition. Her diaries, manuscripts, photographs, artwork and film all reveal a woman who loved to travel, but also one whose connection with the outdoors was important: I had heard the call of the wild, on star-lit nights under the Northern Lights. I […]
Changing gender in Metamorphoses
Ovid’s Metamorphoses has almost 12,000 lines and covers over two hundred and fifty Greek Myths. As the name suggests each of these myths involves some kind of transformation for the characters within it. Some of these transformations are from mortal to immortal, from human to animal and from human to plant, as well as a variety […]
Virginia da Vezzo – (more than) the Wife of Simon Vouet
Hello, my name is Nava Rizvi. I’m a postgraduate Intern in Rare Books Collections and undertook this work as part of my MSc. (History of Art, Theory and Display) at the University of Edinburgh. My main task has been to research and catalogue etchings and engravings held within the Newhailes Collection. Most of them date […]
Variations on a Theme: The Court Case of Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie
In 1810 the schoolteachers Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie found their Edinburgh boarding school abandoned after the rapid removal of every single pupil by their parents. The reason for this exodus stemmed from the accusations voiced by their pupil Jane Cumming who informed her grandmother that the two teachers were in a sexual relationship. Horrified […]
National Library of Scotland and the Edinburgh College of Art: an enduring partnership
Since 2014, the National Library’s Public Programmes team have been regularly working with Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) Illustration tutors and their 1st Year students on an annual collaborative project. Taking inspiration from different aspects of the National Library’s collections, the students have created Riso prints, linocuts, drawings and paper sculptures as part of their […]