The Usurpers, Willa Muir's fourth novel, was written in the early 1950s and was based on the diaries she kept in Prague in the period 1945-1948, when her husband the poet Edwin Muir was the Director the British Institute in Prague, the lecturing and teaching arm of the British Council there. Under the guise of Utopians in Slavomania, The Usurpers offers acute, humorous and sometimes acerbic observations on relations among the British themselves in Prague (the city is never named) and between them and their Czech friends and those in the Czechoslovak establishment who were suspicious of the British presence, and depicts, largely through the actions and conversation of its characters, a deteriorating political environment in which the lives of many Slavomanians and even some of the Utopians are increasingly under threat in the lead-up to the Communist coup of February 1948. The Usupers was ready for publication in 1952 and was submitted to a number of major UK publishers under the pen-name Alexander Cory. The publishers were nervous. There was some concern about libel suits and perhaps also about the political sensitivity of the contents. Then, when she was publicly revealed to be the author, Willa Muir withdrew it. The typescript, from which this edition has been prepared, has long been in the care of the Library of the University of St Andrews and over the years a number of critics and Willa Muir enthusiasts have read it, among them Jim Potts, who brought it to the attention of Colenso Books and who has provided the Introduction. The non-publication of the The Usurpers in the 1950s may have been partly due to political pressure, at a time when the UK government’s grant-in-aid to the British Council was being called in question.

WILLA MUIR (1890–1970), born Willa Anderson, was a Scottish feminist author and translator, married to the poet Edwin Muir. She wrote about her own life and career in Belonging: A Memoir, published in 1968. She is known to have written four novels. The first two, Imagined Corners and Mrs Ritchie were first published in 1931 and 1935 respectively, and republished in a single volume together with some of her feminist essays in 1996 as Imagined Selves, edited by Kirsty Allen. Her third novel Mrs Muttoe and the Top Storey, written 1938–1940, remains unpublished. The Usurpers, her fourth novel, is published here for the first time. It was written in the early 1950s and grew out of her experiences in Prague in the years leading up to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. In that time Edwin Muir was the Director of the British Institute, the lecturing and teaching branch of the British Council in Prague.