When my debut book appeared, a journalist interviewing me expressed astonishment that I hadn’t earned a college degree. He suggested, perhaps benevolently, that this was an unusual trait among novelists. The remark carried with it an unmistakable whiff of prurient patronization. One might wonder what he would have made of Agnes Owens. Owens not only forwent an undergraduate credential but also performed poorly in school, described as a hopeless case. Her first husband was a war veteran haunted by trauma who drank to cope, and with him she bore her initial four children. After his death at forty-three, she worked as a typist, in factories, and as a cleaner. She remarried, had three more children, and did not publish her debut collection until the age of fifty-eight: Gentlemen of the West (1984).
She was discovered at her local writing circle—something she joined to get out of the house—by visiting writers James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead, three towering figures of contemporary Scottish literature. A 2014 obituary in The Scotsman described her upbringing as “poor, but not uncommonly so,” a phrasing that echoes Kelman’s own remark about life being “normal or abnormal” depending on the gaze of reviewers and detractors: “My own background is as normal or abnormal as anyone else’s.” Among her peers, Kelman stands out as Owens’s most evident forerunner.
Owens found a novel way of conveying the surrealness of everyday life.
Formally they diverged: Kelman renders the Glasgow dialect with a fidelity that traps readers inside his narrators’ monologues. Owens, by contrast, crafts brisk, staccato sentences in a Gertrude Stein vein; what seems simple at first glance gradually reveals a sharper, aphoristic edge. Yet both belong to a literary moment in which writers took pride in the local—affirming the legitimacy of colloquial speech in both form and content, grounded in socialist principles rather than a chauvinistic nationalism. Kelman, like Owens, refused the label of life among Scotland’s working class as something exhilaratingly foreign to the reader.
A Working Mother (1994) was Owens’s return to publishing following a lull triggered by the 1987 death of her son Patrick, who was murdered outside the family home at nineteen. Perhaps related, the work is partly autobiographical, reflecting the chaos of raising and supporting children amid the turbulence of substance-fueled life. It’s a compact, jolting book that flits between the ordinariness of Betty’s confined domestic world and the almost slapstick interruptions that intrude when she ventures into the outside world in search of work. Her husband Adam is too damaged by trauma from World War II to hold down a job, leaving their bed at night to crawl on all fours in his sleep, sweating out memories; Adam’s alcoholism and PTSD echo those of Owens’s first husband. The two are fond of each other yet exhausted by one another, sometimes bickering with real melancholy and malice, at other times functioning more like a joint Punch and Judy show before their two children, who erupt with sullenness and spirit at different moments.
The couple are never more animated than when a bottle of “sweet, sickly, but somehow lovely South African wine” is present. The only improvement on drunkenness is to share it at the pub with Brendan, a likeable oaf of a friend whom the couple treat as something between a pet and a foster child—and whom Betty, covertly, regards as a lover as well. Conversations between Betty and Adam about the bleak state of their lives are shot through with punchlines that both mock and ease the paltriness. They cultivate a conspiratorial rhythm that has its own charms. It becomes evident that more than circumstance binds them together—a nihilistic, weary comic bond:
“I’ve got a job,” I told Adam.
“Good for you. I can now relinquish all responsibility for this household then?”
“And I can save up for a divorce,”
“So, let’s celebrate,” said Adam.
In her job as a typist for a legal firm, Betty encounters Mai, a woman in a more desperate predicament than her own. Mai is gauche and blunt, an unwed single mother—too scandalous a state to discuss openly at work. During shared lunches of pie and beans, Mai laments her single status and voices a determined desire to marry someday. She appears dramatically, with spidery mascara and dyed jet-black hair. Betty feels a flutter at the novelty of being out with a woman who turns heads and perhaps a twinge of envy at Mai’s seemingly worse circumstances. When she reluctantly agrees to drive Mai to the pub for a setup with Brendan, she is surprised but not unduly alarmed to learn that Mai prefers Adam’s company.
A Working Mother is, in part, so singular in tone because Owens distributes weight to events with a curious evenness. This is not to say the book lacks texture—the work is anything but dull—but rather that Owens discovers a novel method for conveying the surreal quality of daily life. In Owens’s world, a quick trip to the shop for a bottle is as momentous as watching a coworker flirt with your husband right before you. The episodes that usually function as scaffolding for a narrative are stripped of their inherent meaning. For Betty, the loss of a particularly cherished umbrella commands as much attention as recalling her wedding day:
“He’s just gone round for sugar,” said Adam’s stepmother, who hated Adam. She leant out of her window, looking down on me from the second-storey flat.
“But he’s getting married today. We’ve arranged it at the registrar’s,” I called.
“Oh yes, I believe he mentioned something about it. He shouldn’t be long.”
Betty’s affair with Brendan is also oddly equivocal. Why would she love a rough, unemployed laborer—someone not much more attractive than her own husband? The question does not torment her; she observes the mismatch between reason and action with quiet detachment, returning to Brendan’s embrace on the damp grass of their nocturnal encounters. Within Betty there exists a form of passivity that has become a willful philosophy.
Though A Working Mother is often described as a book about a woman married to an alcoholic, Owens’s shrewd and ironic style refuses the obvious trappings and temptations of such a narrative.
That working-class people live with a paucity of choices and opportunities may be seen from the outside as a moral or social deficit, but Betty recognizes it as the plain fact of her life and moves through it accordingly. When a new opportunity arises, whether advantageous or otherwise but certainly different, she feels compelled to pursue it and discover its outcome. She possesses a sharp intellect that fuels such curiosity, yet it is tempered by the realization that she has little say in her own life. The reality can feel claustrophobic, but at times it also offers a sense of liberation, almost meditative. In that frame, why not submit to the caprices of fortune? When, on occasion, she attempts to probe her situation and illuminate it, there is little give:
“I’ve never made you happy, have I?”
“I’m happy enough.” He sounded uninterested.
Although A Working Mother is frequently described as a novel about a woman married to an alcoholic, Owens’s astute and ironic voice resists the easy trappings and temptations of such a narrative. There is no misery porn, no dwelling on indignities to move the reader; one can see why Betty and Adam enjoy their drinking sessions, including those with Brendan. If it’s not hard to understand why their drinking doesn’t end well, it is also not surprising why they persist—in a pattern that can feel as inevitable as it is stubbornly human. The brutality of their life does not vanish or get softened by the warmth of humor; instead, the two coexist, as they do in real life.
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A Working Mother‘s other great character is Betty’s boss Mr. Robson, who takes a special interest in her and asks her to come to his house out of work hours to help him type his book, The Study of Human Behaviour in Animals. Mr Robson is elderly, genteel, and flattering. But there’s also a sordid side to him: though he doesn’t propose any direct sexual contact, he masturbates behind a screen while Betty patiently waits on the other side: ”As I wasn’t involved in this I considered I had been let off lightly,” she recalls. Mr. Robson’s attentions spark some trouble at home, Adam enjoying the extra income but resentful of his wife’s diverted efforts. What is most troubling about Mr. Robson, though, isn’t his carnal interest but a seedier and stranger one. When she recounts some trouble with Adam and his difficulty recovering from the war, Mr. Robson asks for further details about how it affected him:
“You mean mentally?”
He patted me in a fatherly way above the knee. “I mean sexually.”
Later, she will discover he has been observing her behavior and making note of it dispassionately as though she were a lab specimen. We think back to his initially kind overtures and see them now not as pleasantries or idle interest but expressions of disdainful fascination with a class of people who seem bestial to him. She fascinates him, her reckless oscillation, her lust for Brendan, her fatalism, as though she were a peculiar new breed of animal. When Owens’s son John Crosbie told his mother that he had read one critic describe the novel as an important book about alcoholism, Owens responded drily that she didn’t know she had written a book about alcoholism. Owens, it seems, rejected the impulse to categorize her work much as her narrator rejects Mr. Robson’s impulse to categorize her person.
In Owens’s lifetime the rule was often that you could make art about the poor so long as you held them at a distance and scrutinized them, slotted them into socio-economic sub-headings to show the various ills or improvements they represented. Here’s the feckless poor, here’s the striving poor, here’s the oblivious cheerful poor, here’s the drug addict, here’s the drunk. When James Kelman won the Booker Prize in 1994, the decision was met with disgust by the literary establishment, appalled by the profanity and the informality of the Glasgow drunk whose inner life the novel details. One prominent English columnist described Kelman as “an illiterate savage.” Owens meanwhile was told by one publisher that they were not interested in writing about poor people, the implication being of course that one condition, poverty, cancels out the other, being a person. In A Working Mother, Owens proposes the radical notion that you can be both, and that any given life rewards intelligent attention when it is as fine and as funny and incandescent as hers.
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From A Working Mother by Agnes Owens. Foreward copyright © 2026 by Megan Nolan. Available from McNally Editions.
