HEI: Funding: AHRC DTP
Project Title: Novel Reading and Self-Improvement in Scotland, c.1800–37
Supervisors:
Professor Katie Halsey (University of Stirling)
Dr Gerard McKeever (University of Edinburgh)
Professor Matthew Sangster (University of Glasgow)
What was your research about?
This thesis analyses the relationship between novel reading and self-improvement in Scotland during the early nineteenth century, focusing on the novels of Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, and Elizabeth Hamilton. It contends that, through their self-conscious engagement with discourses on mental and moral improvement, these female novelists contributed something different to the novel from their male contemporaries – including John Galt, James Hogg, and, most famously, Walter Scott – thereby expanding the proliferation of alternative Scottish fiction that Scott’s Waverley Novels enabled. It complements the often male-centric studies of the novel in Romantic-period Scotland to date by elucidating Brunton, Ferrier, and Hamilton’s hitherto underappreciated development of the novel, identifying them as strategic, impactful participants in its generic evolution, whose legacies extend into Victoria’s reign.
I argue that Brunton, Ferrier, and Hamilton redeploy longstanding antinovel stereotypes within their novels in satirical, sophisticated, and implicit ways, in order to promote a model of active reading, centring on distance, self-reflection, and critical readerly engagement. This enables their works to provide antidotes to the ostensibly corrosive effects of novel reading. I argue further that these novelists engage in complicated, performative, often subversive ways with familiar stereotypes pertaining to national identity and mental cultivation. In doing so, they encourage careful reading and present self-improvement as an iterative process comprising education and application.
The first four chapters analyse this process and the distinction between what I term true and false improvement within the novels, alongside their treatment of common prejudices. The final chapter analyses historical readers’ responses to demonstrate the ways in which these novels were recognised as tools for self-improvement.
Ultimately, this thesis argues that paying closer attention to the works of Brunton, Ferrier, and Hamilton, and especially the model of reading they promote, provides us with a new understanding of a pivotal phase in the novel’s development.
What advice you’d have for scholars and writers who want to go for the kind of opportunities that you capitalised on, and to achieve the kind of success you’ve had?
I passed my PhD viva with no corrections on 9 September 2025 and began a fixed-term, full-time role as Research Associate (RA) at the Centre for Robert Burns Studies in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow the following month. The final months of my PhD were taken up almost exclusively with preparing my thesis for final submission (which I completed at the very end of June 2025). They were in this sense unusual as throughout the rest of my PhD I had worked hard to balance researching and writing my thesis alongside a number of other ongoing roles and responsibilities, including but not limited to teaching, mentoring, interning, organising conferences, and writing publications. I maintained this approach throughout my PhD above all because I was very conscious that, as doctoral researchers in the Arts and Humanities today, we are constantly expected to adapt to the need for professional diversification – that idea that a PhD is no longer just about writing a thesis and that it should also prepare us for a variety of careers in and beyond academia.
Meeting this need became an important motivating factor for me as a doctoral researcher, and I remain greatly indebted to SGSAH for all of the opportunities it provided me with during my studies. For example, during my third year I completed a research internship at SGSAH’s head office, working on a project that focused on research culture and doctoral training. This experience was extremely formative, especially in terms of professional development and my perception of my career goals. It opened my eyes to the world of research culture and researcher development (RD) and provided me with a great many tangible examples of roundtables, events, and other digital resources that I organised and could subsequently draw on when applying and interviewing for RD roles in the final months of my PhD. It also prepared me in important ways for my current academic role by requiring me to respond to and put into practice recent and ongoing initiatives within HE policy – be these initiatives to do with career development during the PhD (internship) or safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (RA job). My internship was 3 months FTE in total and I completed it via a mix of full- and part-time blocks before and after a Visiting Doctoral Researcher trip to the University of California, Berkeley’s English department, which was another really valuable experience, also facilitated by SGSAH, that enabled me to benefit from a new academic environment in ways that I’ve been able to gesture to when writing postdoc applications since being awarded my PhD.
I wholeheartedly recommend any and all eligible scholars, researchers, and writers to capitalise on these opportunities that I was lucky enough to benefit from during my PhD. I think above all what juggling the different opportunities on offer thanks to SGSAH alongside other non-SGSAH-related roles and responsibilities taught me was the importance of being able to multitask and also to prioritise. Learning to master both of these skills would therefore be my main bit of advice to all those in the middle, or approaching the end of, their own PhD. It’s important, for example, to be able to develop skillsets and experiences beyond the thesis when you’re in the earlier stages of a PhD, but it’s just as important to be able to recognise when it’s time to focus solely on the thesis in front of you in order to complete it to the level you have in mind. It’s also essential to be clear in yourself what you’d like to get from your programme and when that will then enable you to achieve whatever it is that you would like to do post-PhD. Both of these skills – multitasking and prioritising – were central to own navigation of the various stresses and deadlines that persist throughout the PhD and that can often mount up towards the end and they have also been central to my successes since. Being open to making the most of all that SGSAH, HEIs, and other partner institutions can offer during your PhD is the first important step towards cultivating these capacities.
Where can people find you?
Email: cleo.o.callaghan.yeoman@stir.ac.uk
Linked in: Dr Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman