Quines by Gerda Stevenson sampler

ecognised in this woman a fellow trailblazer.
A year later, while working briefly in Shetland, I tried to find
a boatman to take me out to the island of Mousa. I’ve always
wanted to visit the broch there – one of several ancient Iron Age
tower structures unique to Scotland, and this one still relatively
intact. Mousa isn’t far from mainland Shetland – tantalisingly
close, in fact – but it was late October, past the tourist season,
and the weather stormy. No-one would take me. So I went
to Lerwick’s Shetland Museum instead. There I discovered a
young woman. From the moment I saw her, she claimed all
my attention. Like the Broch of Mousa, she was thousands
of years old, and although I was looking at her reconstructed
head, she appeared to me to be more alive than anyone I’d met
for a long time. I felt she could have been my daughter – same
colour of eyes and hair, same ski-slope nose. Who was she?
What language did she speak? Why did she die so young? She
looked uncannily contemporary. Does history really separate
us, or does it reveal how much we have in common? A poem
was brewing…
I wrote it on the flight home, Shetland and its Broch of
Mousa slipping away beneath me. I began to wonder whether
this could be the beginning of something – a poetry collection,
perhaps, giving voice to Scottish women through the ages,
including Fanny Wright. I started ordering books. The ones
I needed were often out of print. Yet many of these women
I was discovering were so contemporary in their sensibilities
and observations. In the utterly absorbing book compiled by
her daughter, Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old
Age, of Mary Somerville, this major international figure of
science (born 1780) reflects on environmental issues: returning
to the valley of her birthplace, she is perturbed to see the River
Jed ‘invaded by manufactories: there is a perpetual war between
civilisation and the beauty of nature’. And, in her ninth decade,
Somerville writes on women’s place in society:
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