The Three Perils of Woman

Reviews / Votes

The overt aim of publishing material that no one else would touch gives The Three Perils of Women, like so much of Hogg's work, a dangerous, unpredictable quality ... Elegant layout of the new scholarly edition. -- Fiona Stafford Commentators once dismissed Perils of Woman as a bad book because it trampled on the flowerbeds of early-nineteenth-century decorum; they now acclaim it a masterpiece for the very same reason, reading subversive craft in the place of oafishness. -- Ian Duncan Both stories [of The Three Perils of Woman] are generically diverse, self-consciously impure. Hogg described them as 'domestic tales', apparently soliciting a female readership whose delicacy he then assaults with speculations about promiscuity and prostitution, and with prayers so chattily informal that reviewers found them blasphemous. Both stories modulate suddenly from comedy to tragedy, though one - but which? - struggles through to what may be a happy ending. [...] What matters about The Three Perils of Woman is not the conclusions it has to offer about the issues it raises, but the fact that these are addressed with such painful urgency. They have become urgent once again, and will continue to be so; and if the book provides an especially useful way of thinking about them, it's because it offers an 'unflinching' account of a violent national past while acknowledging the temptation, the impulse, even the need, to flinch. -- John Barrell