SOURCE: Lumsden, Alison. “Scottish Women's Short Stories: ‘Repositories of Life Swiftly Apprehended.’” In Contemporary Scottish Women Writers, edited by Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden, pp. 156-69. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Lumsden examines how Kennedy explores issues of both gender and Scottish national identity in her short fiction.

In a recent introduction to the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday collection Shorts, Candia McWilliam writes:

Short stories are a disputed phenomenon. Are they harder, or easier, to write than novels, writers are asked, as though short stories were front gardens and novels arboreta. There's a certain sizeism at play, and a bit of slack thinking. Short stories are shorter than novels and that's it. No proper writer approaches them as a thing to be dealt with frivolously, as it were, in the spare time left by a novel. Short stories are the repositories of life swiftly...