The Three Perils of Woman is essentially a combination of two stories on similar themes, one set in the Highlands following the Battle of Culloden and the other in Hogg's Edinburgh. Daring in its narrative technique, its first readers were confused by the novel's juxtaposition of the comic and the horrific as Hogg explored the relationship between fictional life, as portrayed in, say, the works of Walter Scott, and the realities of nineteenth-century Scotland.

Daring in its subject matter, they were also shocked by its treatment of such delicate matters as prostitution and venereal disease. Last printed in any form in the 1820s, this new edition reveals the exceptional quality of The Three Perils of Woman and puts it squarely back into the mainstream of Scottish literature.