Mairi Kidd does not ask permission to tell women’s stories because she has spent too long watching who gets to grant permission in the first place. Her career sits inside the machinery of Scottish books and culture, not at a safe distance from it. Publishing, education resources, national agencies, committees, strategy, Gaelic language work, the respectable apparatus that loves to praise women while quietly controlling which women get heard. Kidd writes like someone who knows that apparatus from the inside and is bored of its manners.
Her titles alone are a refusal. Warriors, Witches and Damn Rebel Bitches. Feisty and Fiery and Fierce. We Are All Witches. This is not coy feminism. It is a kick at the shins of the polite cultural voice that wants women framed as inspirational, palatable, grateful. Kidd writes women as unruly, historically present, and inconvenient, which is exactly what gets erased when history is told as heritage.
The fight is this: most “women’s history” in mainstream publishing still comes wrapped in apology. It reassures the reader that the past is basically fine, that a few overlooked women can be slotted in without changing the structure. Kidd’s writing rejects that. She does not sprinkle women into the margins of a male story. She rewrites the centre.
Her first novel, The Specimens, is the clearest example because it takes a Scottish horror show everyone thinks they already know, Burke and Hare, and drags the women out of the shadow cast by male notoriety. That choice is political. Not because it is fashionable, but because it attacks the lazy hierarchy of attention. Men commit crimes, men become legends, women become footnotes, witnesses, bodies, scenery. Kidd refuses the footnote role. She makes the women the narrative lens, which forces the reader to confront what the usual telling conveniently avoids: domestic entanglement, economic dependence, coercion, complicity under pressure, survival in a city that treats the poor as disposable.
Permission is a story power tells itself so it can keep hold of the microphone.
Kidd’s work is not interested in “giving voice” as if women were silent by choice. It is interested in exposing the conditions that made women inaudible to official history. The politics are not in the slogans. They are in the insistence that women’s lives were always shaped by structures, class, language, labour, reputation, violence, and the constant threat of being disbelieved. That is why her historical imagination lands. It is not decorative reconstruction. It is a rebuke.
Her Mary Shelley novel, Poor Creatures, keeps that argument going from a different angle. Not the myth of the solitary male genius, but the reality of intellectual inheritance and constraint around a young woman in the orbit of famous names. The point is not to polish Shelley into a modern icon. The point is to show the pressure systems around creativity, scandal, and women’s agency, and to refuse the tidy story where genius floats free of consequence.
What irritates certain readers is that Kidd does not do the expected emotional labour. She does not translate anger into a gentle lesson. She does not offer the reader a moral pat on the head for noticing injustice. She writes with a sharpened tone that assumes the reader can handle being challenged, and if they cannot, that is their problem.
There is also a language politics running through her work that Scottish literary culture often sentimentalises. Gaelic gets treated as heritage branding, something to applaud from a safe distance. Kidd’s background is not that. It is lived expertise and institutional engagement. She understands how “celebrating” a language can become another way of containing it. The same dynamic applies to women’s stories. Celebration without redistribution is just another form of control.
Telling women’s stories without permission is not rebellion for its own sake. It is refusing the gate the culture insists is there.
This is why Kidd matters. She is not writing from the outside begging entry. She has held roles where the rules are written, and she still chooses bluntness over diplomacy on the page. That combination is rare. It is easy to be radical when you are excluded. It is harder when you know the levers and still decide not to soften.
And yes, her work will annoy people who want historical fiction to behave like heritage tourism. They want the past as a costume drama with tasteful suffering. Kidd gives them systems instead. Poverty, exploitation, gendered vulnerability, the way reputations are weaponised, the way women are forced into compromises that later readers mislabel as moral failings. She does not tidy any of it to protect the reader’s comfort.
If you want permission, you want a gatekeeper. Kidd writes as if the gatekeeper is the problem. She is right.
