Certainly, this entrenched and institutionalised sexism has contributed to Owens’ absence from Scottish literary studies. But there’s another reason, too. When trying to have Gentlemen of the West published, Owens recalls one publisher telling her that ‘people didn’t want that kind of writing ... about poor people’.

But it is on the Left that the most comprehensive split has emerged, based on two competing interpretations: one, that Scottish independence would mean the liberation of a country that has been under an imperial yoke, disguised as union, for three centuries (and under its dominance for a millennium); and the other, that the break-up of the UK would be a division of the working class of the Union, making it easier to defeat them with money and power.