James Hogg: A Life

Book info: James Hogg: A Life (Hardcover, 360 pages) – Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Language: English.

James Hogg’s life-story is one of extraordinary transitions and in his own lifetime he was best known as a heaven-inspired and naive Scottish rustic who featured as the boozing buffoon of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. In his own fascinating Memoir this notoriously open-hearted man was curiously reticent about certain passages in his life. He was a man of apparent contradictions: a partisan Tory with Radical friends; an upholder of oral tradition who eagerly embraced every new development in early nineteenth-century print culture; a man who wrote against biographical intrusions yet in his own life writing, stories and poems emphasised his persona and origins as the Ettrick Shepherd. His formidable intelligence and drive were seldom acknowledged, and his most challenging work disturbed conventional readerly preconceptions.Key Features:*Documents a life from ragged boy cowherd to famous author.*Gives due weight to the neglected parts of Hogg’s story for the first time.*Draws extensively on Hogg’s correspondence and a rich archive of documentary material. Editorial Reviews Review ...material richly gathered from editing, from annotating letters and several of the volumes in the series [The Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg], and from a lifetime's work in the original manuscripts underpins Gillian Hughes' excellent biography.-- "University of Edinburgh Journal"

Hughes's contribution is both authoritative and thorough, exemplifying the depth of scholarship and research associated with the S/SC edition of Hogg.

--Deirdre A. Shepherd, University of Edinburgh "BARS Bulletin and Review"

A biography as good as this is almost as admirable as Hogg's own works...-- "Studies in Hogg and His World"

Gillian Hughes's biography is a welcome addition to Hogg scholarship. It's academia, but academia with a heart...--Stephen Daisley "The Herald"

Gillian Hughes's Life represents the fruit of a lifetime commitment to Hoggstudies. The result is undeniably the first fully-fledged modern biography ofHogg.--Peter Garside "Edinburgh Review"

Hughes has here produced the definitive life of James Hogg, the result of decades of research and study...Those already acquainted with Hogg and looking for a fuller understanding of the many conflicting currents that made up the man will be excellently served by Gillian Hughes' biography.-- "Use of English"

This is an admirable biography which does justice, with ample evidence, to a major writer who has waited more than a century for adequate recognition.-- "The Scotsman"

Gillian Hughes is a fine scholar, and her life of James Hogg shows an extraordinary inwardness with Hogg's domestic manners and the progress of his double life as shepherd and as writer.--Karl Miller, author of Electric Shepherd: A Likeness of James Hogg' About the Author Gillian Hughes, Independent Scholar, has been a General Editor of the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg, and is currently an advisory editor for the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry and for the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. She has published critical editions of works by each of these writers, and also a biography of James Hogg.