The Woman Clothed with the Sun; being The Confession of John McHaffie concerning his sojourn in the Wilderness among the folk called the Buchanites, is a historical novella by the British writer F. L. Lucas.

It purports to be an account, written in 1814 by a Scottish minister of the Kirk in middle age and published posthumously, of his youthful bewitchment by Elspeth Buchan and of the time he spent in the 1780s among the Buchanites.

After an account of his childhood, the narrator describes the stir caused in his town in 1782–3 by the fanatical preaching in the Relief Church of the new minister, Hugh White, a fearsome "false Elijah" who has danced among the Shakers of Mother Ann Lee in America.

At first John joins the Irvine rabble in persecuting Elspeth and the Buchanites, a revivalist sect who believe they are the elect living in the Last Days, shortly to be translated en bloc to Heaven without tasting death.

Among the faithful is Jean Gardner, "loveliest of lasses ... with great coils of auburn hair", whom "that ungodly young poet" Robert Burns had tried to lure from the sect.

He describes the preparations for Ascension, as the "time for our translation heavenward was near at hand" : the forty-day fast, barricaded in their barn, and the sufferings it brings; the mockery of the locals; the desertion of one of their number and her calling in of the magistrates to save her starving children.

He is summonsed and brought home; but in a few days he escapes and returns to the Society, just in time to witness the abortive Ascension on midsummer's dawn – a failure put down by Elspeth to lack of faith.

The narrative is John HcHaffie's "warning ... (particularly to young callants [lads] puffed up with a little learning) against enthusiasm and false prophets and headstrong wrestings of the Scriptures".

[11] A secondary theme is that sons may react negatively to the virtues of their fathers, so that "through the contrariness of our fallen nature, the bairns might oft times have been better, had their parents been less good.

[16] After the cool reception of his novel Doctor Dido (1938), however, he turned instead to history-based poetry,[17] not writing another novel till his retirement – The English Agent: A Tale of the Peninsular War (1969).

J. D. Beresford in the Manchester Guardian said of The Woman Clothed with the Sun, "The manner of writing is that proper to the period, with a spicing of dialect, both so admirably rendered that we might easily be deceived into the belief that it is an authentic document.

"[22] The novella was the title-story and longest (at some 25,000 words) in a collection of ten, published in 1937 by Cassell and Company of London and in 1938 by Simon & Schuster of New York, as The Woman Clothed with Sun, and Other Stories.