Epic Portrayal of the Scottish Icon: Margaret Holford’s Wallace; or, The Fight of Falkirk

Abstract

Margaret Holford (1778-1852) was an English poet, translator, and novelist who continuously published her works between the years 1809 and 1838. Although Holford can be considered as a prolific writer in the early nineteenth century, her works do not find a place in today’s canon and she has become one of the forgotten women poets of the Pre-Victorian period. In The Wallace; or, the Fight of Falkirk, she recounted the last days of William Wallace who was a Scottish patriot and a Guardian of Scotland. This article aims to analyze Holford’s poem as an example of an epic poem since she employs the characteristics of the epic genre in her work. The analysis of Holford’s work provides an important insight into the issue of women’s participation in the male-dominated epic genre. Although it was believed that women were not capable of writing epic poems in terms of their lack of formal education and intellectual capacity, there was a small group of women poets who produced long heroic poems in the early nineteenth century and Holford was one of them. From this vantage point, the fundamental purpose of this study is to show to what extent Margaret Holford’s poem epitomizes the epic genre. In a broader perspective, the paper aims to underline the contributions of Holford, who has been pushed to the margins for more than two centuries, to women’s writing.