While critics of Duncan Campbell Scott have tended to focus on his poetry, his fiction reveals an overlooked side of Scott that focuses on humanity rather than nature. Five stories – "Vain Shadow," Labrie's Wife," "Vengeance is Mine," "Expiation," and "In the Year 1806," from the collection The Witching of Elspie – bring out, through their primarily male Scottish protagonists, the most subtle and self-torturing situations in which a northern form of Puritanism might embroil itself. These stories move closer towards the modern novel's sense of isolation and crisis of consciousness, with the characters' social and psychological and moral tensions, their struggles with time and memory, holding the reader's attention.
