SOURCE: "Witch or Pawn: Women in Scott's Narrative Poetry," in Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor, Indiana University Press, 1988, pp. 115-36.

An American educator and critic, Goslee is the author of a study about Scott's poetry, Scott the Rhymer (1988). In the following essay, she contends that while most of the female characters in Scott's narrative poems are cast in narrow roles, a few of his women undermine gender stereotypes.

When Walter Scott reviewed Jane Austen's novel Emma in 1816, he praised it highly; but he also criticized Austen's overemphasis upon a mercenary lust for property, a prudence at odds with the sense of romance. Not only is this unfair to Austen's biting analyses of the marriage market, but it obscures Scott's own portrayals of similar pressures within the plots of the romantic novels he had begun to publish two years earlier. Even in the narrative poems, far...