Bookended by the towering talents of Scott and Stevenson, the 19th century tends otherwise to be seen as a less than distinguished period for Scottish literature. The publication of Scott’s Waverley in 1814 established the novel form as the era’s dominant fictional vehicle virtually overnight in Scotland, with Scott remaining the undisputed leader in this field for at least another ten years.

Of the other Scottish authors who emerged to cater for the novel’s fast-growing readership, the most significant included Susan Ferrier (1782-1854), sometimes likened to a “Scottish Jane Austen”; the ambitious, Enlightenment-inspired John Galt (1779-1839), and James Hogg (1770-1835), whose Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), in its philosophical complexity and prefiguring of the modern psychological novel, ranks as one of Scotland’s literary landmarks.

Despite the relative paucity of Scottish rivals to the great English novelists of the age, the early 19th century, in particular, was characterised by rapid expansion in Scottish publishing, and in literary periodicals, with such titles as the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine playing a prominent role in the cultural and political debates of the day.

Nonetheless, the relative lack of opportunities for writers in Scotland compared to London saw many gifted Scots joining a southward brain-drain, often in pursuit of the journalistic work that offered the first steps up the literary career ladder. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was the outstanding exemplar of this trend, while Lord Byron (1788-1824), self-styled as “born half a Scot and bred a whole one”, created a Europe-wide archetype of Romantic heroism which still endures today.

To a large extent, the latter end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th represent a somewhat ignominious chapter in Scotland’s literary history, with the ascendancy of those novelists nowadays bracketed as the “kailyard” (literally "cabbage patch") school. Often interpreted as expressing a nostalgic yearning for a rural, agrarian past, as well as an escapist, reductive version of Scottishness, in response to the homogenising effects of industrialisation and Empire, kailyard writing is typified by mawkish sentimentality, predictably pious morality and stock rustic characters. In the hands of its best-known practitioners, however, such as J.M. Barrie (1860-1937) – of Peter Pan fame – Samuel Crockett (1860-1914) and Ian MacLaren (1850-1907), it not only achieved enormous popularity, both at home and abroad, but encompassed a diversity of approach and, at times, a level of literary merit often obscured by its cruder maudlin excesses.

A bracing counterblast to this tide of sentiment was delivered by George Douglas Brown’s The House With the Green Shutters (1901), a ferocious anti-romantic inversion of kailyard conventions, simultaneously charting the impact of modernising forces on rural Scotland. John MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914) followed in a similarly satirical vein, while elsewhere the detective fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), the adventure novels and spy thrillers of John Buchan (1875-1940) and the comic tales of Neil Munro (1864-1930) developed their own successful genre variations on 19th century themes.

From early in the 19th century, an expanding network of Gaelic Schools Societies helped re-establish the language as an educational medium. Combined with the effects of clearance and industrialisation, and the growth of Gaelic-speaking communities in Lowland Scotland, especially Glasgow and Clydeside, this helped furnish the readership for a number of new periodicals, and an increased volume of book publication in Gaelic.

Religious and evangelical themes continued to predominate – the Bible was still the only book in many Gaelic-speaking households - but post-Ossian enthusiasm also led to the publication of several Gaelic grammars and dictionaries, as well as important collections of songs and folk-tales. The latter trend was crowned with the appearance of Carmina Gadelica, compiled by Alexander Carmichael (1832-1912), whose detailed and comprehensive translations of traditional poems, prayers, blessings, charms and hymns, published in several volumes from 1900, opened Gaelic literature to a still-wider audience.

The Highland Clearances, unsurprisingly, elicited most of the period’s memorable Gaelic poetry, especially when energised by the Land League campaigns of the 1880s, and accompanying Home Rule sentiments, in the hands of such authors as Lewis’s John Smith, and Mary Macpherson of Skye. Another significant figure was Iain MacGhill Eathain (John MacLean) of Tiree, who wrote potently about the emigrant experience of adjusting to life in Nova Scotia. Gaelic language and culture also attained a new scholarly respectability during this time, with the establishment of “Celtic” studies in three of Scotland’s four universities between 1882 and 1916.