Willa Muir was born Wilhelmina Johnston Anderson in Montrose in 1890, to parents from Shetland, and graduated from St Andrews with first-class honours in classics. With her husband, the poet Edwin Muir, she lived in Prague, Dresden, Vienna, France, Italy and England, paying their way by teaching, freelance writing and translation. She also published under the name Agnes Neill Scott.
Her own books are Scottish and watchful. Imagined Corners (1931) is set in Calderwick, a made-up town modelled on Montrose, where Elizabeth Shand pushes against a conventional marriage and the expectations placed on women. Mrs Ritchie (1933) is darker and less autobiographical. Her essays, Women: An Inquiry (Hogarth Press, 1925) and Mrs Grundy in Scotland (1936), turn the same scrutiny on society, and Belonging (1968) is her memoir of her life with Edwin.
Translation made her name abroad. The Muirs gave English readers their first Kafka: The Castle in 1930, then The Trial, published by Gollancz in 1937. They also translated Hermann Broch's trilogy The Sleepwalkers. In Belonging she described the method: each took half a book, then they went through each other's pages line by line. Edwin received most of the credit in their lifetimes, but in 1958 the German Academy for Language and Literature gave the Johann-Heinrich-Voss Prize to both of them. A late novel, The Usurpers, set in postwar Prague, was long lost and reached print only decades after her death.
Start with The Trial. Their version is the one that gave English its sense of Josef K. and his unexplained arrest, and it is worth knowing that it follows the text as Max Brod edited it, not the later restored one. Then try Imagined Corners to hear Muir in her own voice.
