The Three Perils of Woman

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.

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.

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.

While they are recovering, tended by an increasingly demented Sally, Peter's wife betrays them to the government forces and they are killed by a sergeant.

In spite of the largely unrelieved tragedy of its third part, Three Perils contains more comedy than Hogg's better-known The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

In the first two stories, Hogg introduces buffoons (Rickleton, the minister, Daft Davie Duff the sexton) who provide comic relief.

[4] Gatty's loss of awareness and/or memory is paralleled by that of Robert Wringhim in Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

He recognises the virtues of the Highlanders and deplores the brutality of the English reprisals under the Duke of Cumberland, but towards the end of the book suggests that this is divine retribution for the atrocities committed on the Low Church Covenanters of southern Scotland in the 17th century.

A possible reason is censorship, as Hogg dealt in a matter-of-fact way with issues such as prostitution and illegitimacy, which were still widely seen as unsuitable subjects for fiction when Wilkie Collins broached them 40 or more years later.

Antony Hasler observes that the original reviews of The Three Perils of Women 'remain interesting, since their bafflement and disorientation are often a precise and sensitive register of what is […] a distinctly free-handed way with contemporary literary expectations'.

[5] In an extensive analysis of the reviews, David Groves indicates that while there was appreciation of Hogg's stylistic vigour and flair for story-telling, his rich humour, and the power of his pathetic scenes, critics were disconcerted by what they took to be his coarse vulgarity and blasphemy, and by the instabilility of his characterisation.