The Three Perils of Woman is a three volume work of one novel and two linked novellas by James Hogg. Following its original publication in 1823, it was omitted from Victorian editions of Hogg’s ‘’Collected Works’’ and re-published only in 2002.
The novellas depict events of the Jacobite rising of 1745 and the English reprisals under the Duke of Cumberland, while the novel depicts a woman with amnesia in Edinburgh during the 1820s.
Background
On 9 January 1823 Hogg indicated to William Blackwood that composition of a companion piece to The Three Perils of Man, which had appeared in June 1822, was well advanced: he had completed the first and by far the longest of its three fictions. He said that the project had been suggested by John Gibson Lockhart and that it had been begun in October. It was completed during the first half of 1823, and on 11 August the publishers Longmans in London were expecting delivery of the printed copies from Edinburgh.
Plot summary
The three perils are love, leasing (an old Scots term for lying) and jealousy.
Love
This part, which takes up the first two volumes, is set in about 1820 and is the story of Agatha (Gatty) Bell, the daughter of Daniel Bell, a sheep farmer in the Scottish Borders. Gatty meets and falls in love with M’Ion, a Highland aristocrat. Her feelings are reciprocated, but because of both parties’ extreme reticence and distaste for exposing their emotions, each comes to believe that the other detests them.
Gatty, who is in Edinburgh with Mrs Johnson, her old nurse (governess), living in an apartment in the same house as M’Ion (who turns out to be Mrs Johnson's illegitimate son), demands that her father take her home. He complies, and M’Ion proposes to and is accepted by Gatty’s friend Cherubina (Cherry) Elliot. By various shifts, Cherry is persuaded to relinquish M’Ion to Gatty, and M’Ion to declare his true love. Gatty and M’Ion are married, but Cherry dies and Gatty becomes convinced that she too is to die on a certain day. On the appointed day, Gatty falls into a catatonic suspended animation. She is taken to Edinburgh, where she recovers a degree of consciousness and activity and gives birth to a son, but has no memory of her prior life. She remains in this state for three years and on returning to her former mind is astonished to find herself the mother of a young son. M’Ion and her friends gently re-introduce her to the real world, and her story ends happily.
A comic sub-plot concerns Richard Rickleton, a good-natured but uncouth and impetuous farmer. Brought to Edinburgh as a suitor for Gatty when M’Ion is out of favour, he commits various solecisms, and when M’Ion and his friends - incited by the mischievous Joseph, Gatty’s brother - raise subjects of conversation which unwittingly offend him, becomes violent, and ends up in jail. Still enraged, he challenges M’Ion and his two friends to duels, in one of which he wounds M’Ion - the others not caring to face his anger. While ostensibly Gatty’s suitor, he also pays court to Katie M’Nab, whose forward manners are in complete contrast to Gatty’s.
After the end of Gatty’s story, Rickleton’s is completed. He marries Katie but three months later she leaves him to visit Edinburgh. He follows her and discovers she has just given birth to a child not his own. After a ludicrous pursuit of Katie’s seducer, involving mistaken identity and other errors, Rickleton decides to divorce Katie. However on one last visit, he forgives her and accepts the child as his own.
Leasing
This novella is set just before the Battle of Culloden (1746) in which the Jacobite forces were defeated and brutally scattered by the Hanoverian army. Sally Niven is an attractive and virtuous young woman, servant to the minister of her parish, and in love with Peter Gow the smith. Peter inadvertently shoots dead a man who is conducting an illicit burial in the churchyard, and Sally concocts a lie that he was preventing a grave robbery, which enables him to escape punishment. She is less successful with another lie: after her master, who has been terrified by being arrested and released, insists that she keep him company all one night, she tells Peter she was visiting elsewhere. But he has eavesdropped on them and so catches her in her lie. Their impending marriage is broken off.
The historical backdrop is the manoeuvres leading up to Culloden. Hogg places the action almost between the lines, in a menacing atmosphere of suspicion, allegations of treason and summary punishment without regard to guilt. In a humorous episode, Gow and a few followers rout a large body of pro-Hanoverian troops who mistake them in the dark for an army, panic and flee.