That Duffy was born in Scotland but grew up in England has inspired much of her creative work on topics of personal and national origins. Especially early in her life, Duffy struggled to answer a basic question about her identity: Is she Scottish or is she English? While the relationship between the two nations spans many centuries, significant changes were taking place during the 1980s and 1990s, when Duffy composed the work that appears in The Other Country and it was published.

Scotland is one of four national units, along with England, Northern Ireland, and Wales, that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several independent European dynasties formed political unions, and Scotland was among those self-governing nations that relinquished its sovereignty in favor of forming a more powerful union with allied nations. Regardless of what political entities do...