Existing Research on Dorothy Dunnett
Existing Research on Dorothy Dunnett
Bold, Alan. ‘Women and history: Plaidy, Michison, Dunnett’, in Modern Scottish Literature. Longman, 1983.
Burgess, Moira. ‘The Modern Historical Tradition’, in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan. Edinburgh University Press, 1997, pp. 456-467. Interesting on Dunnett’s use of colour.
Elphinstone, Margaret. ‘Naomi Mitchison and Dorothy Dunnett’, in Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, edited by Rose Pipes and Elizabeth Ewan. Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Emerson, Kathy Lynn. How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries: The Art and Adventure of Sleuthing Through the Past. SCB Distributors, 2019.
Ferguson, Stuart. ‘The imaginative construction of historical character: what Georg Lukacs and Walter Scott could tell contemporary novelists’. Scottish Studies Review 6.2 (2005): 32-48. Mentions DD in passing and says that the amount of detail she offers can be distracting.
Germanà, Monica. ‘Contemporary fiction’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Glenda Norquay. Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 152-162.
Gifford, Douglas. ‘Modern Scottish Fiction’. Studies in Scottish Literature 13.1 (1978): 250-273. Written just after the completion of the Lymond books, it calls him ‘a James Bond of the Middle Ages’. Can be accessed at https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol13/iss1/
Halperin, Charles J. ‘The Fictional Ivan: Ivan the Terrible in English-Language Fiction’. Russian Studies. Hu 5.2 (2023): 71-86. Dismisses The Ringed Castle with ‘Fact check: Dunnett’s novel personifies the ultimate Eurocentric arrogance’. Can be accessed at https://russianstudies.hu/
Hopkins, Lisa. ‘Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond and Niccolò series: history versus experience’, in Working Papers on the Web9 (December, 2006). Online: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/8842/3/Hopkins_Dorothy_Dunnett.pdf . Argues that after the death of a character named Walter Scott Dunnett takes the genre of the historical novel in new directions.
Hopkins, Lisa. ‘A man with a map: The Millennial Macbeth’, in Shakespeare and Millennial fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley. Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 145-58. Compares various modern novelisations of Macbeth.
Hopkins, Lisa. ‘The Body in the Library: Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett and Sarah Caudwell’, in Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction. Palgrave, 2021, pp. 63-91.
Hopkins, Lisa. ‘Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter and Scotland’s Place in Europe’, in Macbeth, eds Paul Prescott and Juan Francisco Cerda. London: Bloomsbury, 2026, pp. 95-106. Argues that one of the main concerns of King Hereafteris to showcase Scotland’s connections with Scandinavia and other parts of Europe.
Kearns, Cleo McNelly, ‘Dubious Pleasures: Dorothy Dunnett and the Historical Novel’, Critical Quarterly 32 (spring 1990): 36-48. Begins with a theoretically-informed consideration of the historical novel as a genre before proceeding to close analysis of the cockfighting scene in Checkmate and thence to a discussion of King Hereafter, with particular reference to Lulach’s glimpses of the future. Touches very briefly on the Lymond series as a whole and on the first of the Niccolò books.
McCulloch, Fiona. ‘Women’s Writing, 1900–2020’. A Companion to Scottish Literature, edited by Gerald Carruthers. John Wiley and Sons, 2024, pp. 598-610.
MacDonald, Catriona. ‘Genre and gender: Dorothy Dunnett and the making of Scottish popular history in a global context’, in Gender and mobility in Scotland and abroad, edited by Sierra Dye, Elizabeth Ewen, and Alice Glaze. University of Guelph, Ontario, 2018.
McLeod, Amanda J. The Treatment of Gender in Twentieth-Century Scottish Women’s Historical Fiction. MLitt thesis, University of Glasgow, 2001. Accessible at https://theses.gla.ac.uk/76188/
Maitzen, Rohan. ‘The grim prerequisite: The myriad pleasures of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles – and its hero of “unflinching integrity”’. Times Literary Supplement 5980 (2017): 23-25.
Maley, Willy. ‘The crème de la crème? Old favourites, new-fangled works, and other fictions’. Studies in Scottish Literature 43.2 (2017): 179-184. Commends Dunnett briefly and in passing. Can be accessed at https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol13/iss1/
Marsden, Stevie. ‘Why women don’t win literary awards: The Saltire Society literary awards and implicit stereotyping’. Women: a cultural review 30.1 (2019): 43-65. Mentions that Dunnett was shortlisted for King Hereafter. Can be accessed at https://figshare.le.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Why_Women_Don_t_Win_Literary_Awards_The_Saltire_Society_Literary_Awards_and_Implicit_Stereotyping/10220315?file=18432878
Milton, Colin. ‘Past and Present: Modern Scottish Historical Fiction’. The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Volume Three: Modern Transformations: New Identities (from 1918) (2007): 114-29.
Morrison, Elspeth. The Dorothy Dunnett Companion, vols 1 and 2, New York: Random House, 1994 and 2002. Alphabetically arranged and compiled with help from Dunnett herself, these offer maps, explanations of literary, musical and historical allusions, and sources of quotations.
Norquay, Glenda. ‘Genre Fiction’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Glenda Norquay. Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 2012-130.
Rambo, Elizabeth, and Heike Meyer. ‘Accidental Medievalist: Dorothy Dunnett and King Hereafter’, in Authentically Medieval: Authors and Scholars on Depicting the Middle Ages in Fiction, edited by Debra E. Best, Elizabeth L. Rambo and Patricia H. Ward. McFarland, 2024, pp. 245-262.
Richardson, Scott. Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles: The Enigma of Francis Crawford (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2016). As the title suggests, this focuses on Lymond, whom Richardson describes as a ‘thinking man’s swashbuckler’, and considers the books under three headings: first ‘The Fractured Hero’, which contains chapters on sidekicks, doubles, and family complications; next ‘Espionage’, with chapters on the spy novel, concealment, and theatre; and finally ‘Games’, with chapters on games in the novels and the games played by the narrator. Inevitable spoilers mean this is only suitable for people who have read all six Lymond books, but it does not assume knowledge of either the House of Niccolò, King Hereafter or the Johnson Johnson series.
Samson, Alexander. ‘Mary I in The Ringed Castle’, in Writing Mary I: History, Historiography, and Fiction, edited by Valerie Schutte and Jessica S. Hower. Palgrave, 2022, pp. 191-216.
Saricks, Joyce G. The readers’ advisory guide to genre fiction. American Library Association, 2001.
Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel. Palgrave, 2005, pp. 142-9. Suggestive analysis of the tension between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in the Lymond books which also pays attention to the sustained chess metaphor of the titles.
Walsh, Michael J. K. Beyond Famagusta: Cultural Memory and Historical Imagination. Vol. 30. Brill, 2026.
Watson, Roderick. ‘The twentieth century: the Scottish Renaissance’. The Literature of Scotland. Macmillan Education UK, 1984, pp. 325-457.
Wilt, Judith. ‘The Hero in “Gouvernance”: Family Romance in the Novels of Dorothy Dunnett’. In Women Writers and the Hero of Romance. Palgrave, 2014, pp. 160-194. Notes that the Lymond Chronicles cover the same period as the texts explored by Stephen Greenblatt in his influential critical work Renaissance Self-Fashioning but argues that both Lymond and Nicholas are fashioned not only by themselves but crucially by their mothers; also comments very interestingly on Cicero’s De Republica as a link between the two heroes. There will be spoilers for anyone who has not read all the books in both series.
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