The publication of The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women is both a welcome and a significant event. It marks a new phase in the development of women's history in Scotland, along with its companion volume, Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (ed. Lynn Abrams et al. [Edinburgh, 2006]). For historians of women's history and the history of gender relations in Scotland, the majority of them women, it has been an uphill struggle to establish the importance of a gender analysis of Scottish history. We have looked with envy at our neighbors—England and Ireland—where the field has been more thickly populated and the literature more voluminous. In this context, a major resource such as the biographical dictionary makes its mark in a number of ways: it provides evidence, it gives guidance to sources, it is richly suggestive of themes and interconnections that will act as a catalyst for further work, and it is indicative of the extent of the international network of scholars and researchers interested in this field.

In a thoughtful introduction of exemplary clarity, the editors outline the key aims and characteristics of the dictionary. The definition of “Scottish” includes those born in Scotland, those living in Scotland for “an appreciable period,” or who have influenced Scottish national life in some way, and also some who made a name for themselves as part of the “Scottish diaspora.” The chronological range of the dictionary covers from the earliest records of Roman Britain to a date of death before January 2005. The aim to include as many documented women as possible from medieval and early modern Scotland has been amply met, though inevitably there are more entries from the modern period.

One of the strengths of this biographical dictionary is the range of categories of women it contains, going far beyond the well known (or “weel kent,” as Scots might say), the powerful, and the famous, though such women also find their place. In its pages are to be found eminent and elite women, especially from the early period of Scottish history, women representative of significant social phenomena such as the period of persecution of witches, women who were bearers of tradition as singers and transmitters of folk songs and ballads, women whose achievements lay in fields traditionally regarded as masculine, such as science, mathematics, and medicine, women who gained notoriety for flouting social conventions or committing crimes, political activists, and writers and artists. Two categories represent in particular an innovative approach to biography: a group of quasi-historical, fictional, or mythical women, who have a place in narratives and representations of Scottishness and a Scottish past; and women in a range of occupations and professions in which their presence was significant, such as east coast herring gutters, Dundee jute weavers, Shetland knitters, and compositors in Edinburgh's printing trade.

Among the many women here, a few examples may illustrate the range. There is Aud, the “Deep-Minded,” both a legendary character of Icelandic saga fame and, historically, a founding settler of Iceland in the ninth century and daughter of the Norse ruler of the Hebrides. Annie Small, a missionary in India, critic of empire, and pioneer of professional education for women missionaries, serves as an example of how women used the opportunities opened up to them through access to higher education in nineteenth-century Scotland. From the contemporary women's movement there is Franki Raffles, photographer and cofounder of the Zero Tolerance campaign against violence against women, and who died tragically young in childbirth. If tragedy and injustice against women are depicted in the dictionary, there is humor too. The entry on Maw Broon, “for 70 years the matriarch of The Broons comic strip” (46) in D. C. Thomson's Sunday Post, gently assigns the stereotype of the self-sacrificing wife and mother to the past.

This book has many virtues. It is consistently of a high standard, and within the constraints of necessarily short entries, authors demonstrate time and again the capacity to succinctly draw out the significance of individuals’ lives, placing them in the context of their social milieu and the dominant patterns of gender relations of the time. The inclusiveness of the categories used produces a richly layered and textured tapestry of Scottish life throughout the ages and women's place within it. As the editors proclaim, women have “in every thinkable way, contributed to the Scottish nation and its identity” (xxv). Particularly striking is the resourcefulness of women, not just all those who had to make their own lives out of economic necessity but also all the others who put their hand to various enterprises and projects, using the resources they had to contribute to the common good and to civil society. There are many examples of women supporting philanthropic causes, establishing educational institutions, or acting as patrons of the arts. Thus women not only found means of sustaining themselves and expressing themselves, but they actively constructed Scotland's social fabric, along with other women and with their menfolk. Places, institutions, icons, symbols that we take for granted as representing the national life and national past have been put into place by women as well as men, though not necessarily on an equal basis or through organizations of an egalitarian or inclusive nature. But women's separate public lives often paralleled men's and often embodied similar values, as Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair have demonstrated of nineteenth-century Glasgow's middle classes (Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain [New Haven, CT, 2003]). From a perusal of the pages of the biographical dictionary, women's agency, not passivity or confinement, emerges as the key theme, offering further confirmation of the findings of other recent work on Scottish women's history.

By comparison, William Knox's volume, Lives of Scottish Women, inevitably appears a much more limited exercise. In selecting ten individual women as his subjects, Knox has a much harder task in justifying any claims of representativeness. The one advantage that his approach offers, the capacity to provide a more detailed account of the lives of his subjects than is possible within the constraints of biographical dictionary entries, he on occasion throws away through wandering from the focus of his subject's life. Furthermore, this volume suffers from an overreliance on the judgments of contemporary and earlier biographies, often reproduced with little critical evaluation. Secondary sources, including some excellent recent publications, are not always exploited to the full. Readers will find more factual information about the lives of the individuals included in this volume than in the biographical dictionary and will also find information about sources worth following up. However, the inaccuracies in the book and its underutilization of sources means that it should be approached with caution. Taken together, these volumes add greatly to our knowledge of the lives of women in Scotland's past and provide much encouragement for further research. Scholars of Scottish women's history will find useful material in them both. It is, however, the biographical dictionary that is likely to be treasured, not only as the rich resource that it undoubtedly is but because in its depiction of women's contribution to the life of Scotland, as the late Sue Innes wrote of women's presence in the newly elected Scottish Parliament of 1999, it is “quietly thrilling” (“‘Quietly Thrilling’: Women in the New Parliament,” in Women and Contemporary Scottish Politics, ed. Esther Breitenbach and Fiona Mackay [Edinburgh, 2001], 249–53).