The Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature by Trevor Royle

Author:Trevor Royle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780574196
Publisher: Mainstream

Kames, Lord. See HOME, HENRY.

Keddie, Henrietta [‘Sarah Tytler’] (1827–1914). Novelist. She was born in Cupar, Fife, the daughter of a lawyer. Early in her childhood the family moved to the village of Elie on the Fife coast in order to be near the coal-mine in which all their finances were invested. At the age of 16 she was sent to Edinburgh to complete her education and it was while she was there that she met the essayist JOHN BROWN, who encouraged her literary aspirations. Her early work appeared in BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE and on her return to Fife she pursued her literary interests in St Andrews, where she was an acquaintance of JAMES FREDERICK FERRIES, A. K. H. BOYD and JOHN TULLOCH. The death of her father forced her to earn a living, and with her sisters she set up a small private school in Cupar, which they operated between 1848 and 1870. Eventually the success of her literary career under her own name and her pseudonym, ‘Sarah Tytler’, allowed her to give up the school, and from 1884 she lived first in London and then in Oxford, where she died on 8 June 1914.

Henrietta Keddie’s autobiography Three Generations of a Middle-Class Scottish Family (1911) is an entertaining account of her childhood years and literary life and is replete with fond memories of the people she had known in the course of a long and busy life. It also presents her as a modest, yet hard-working and persevering woman who, against all the odds, became one of the most popular and successful authors of her generation. Much of her work was written quickly and with the sole object of making money: biographical sketches, travel books, advice to young girls and other journalistic pieces, but two novels from her huge output stand out. Logie Town (1887) is a well-observed portrayal of life in a small Fife town at the time of the Reform Bill of 1832. Like its near-contemporary novel JOHNNY GIBB OF GUSHETNEUK by WILLIAM ALEXANDER (ii), it records with the minimum of sentimentality the claustrophobic society and stultifying bourgeois values of the town of Logie. There is also a fondness for the town and its people, balanced against that knowledge of the deficiences displayed by its society, making Logie Town one of the most satisfying portrayals of life in a Victorian small town in Scotland. St Mungo’s City (1884), which traces the life and times of a self-made businessman in Glasgow, is notable for the accurate observation of the changing industrial society of the west of Scotland. The subtlety with which Henrietta Keddie viewed Scottish society, her ability to delineate aspects of character and to render Scottish speech in these two novels provide a tantalizing glimpse of what she might have achieved had she not been forced into writing pulp literature for a living.

WORKS: Phemie Millar, 3 vols. (1854); The Nut Brown Maids (1859); Meg of Elibank (1860); Weaving the Willow (1860); My Heart’s in the Highlands (1861); A Simple Woman (1863); Heroines in Obscurity (1871); Lady Bell, 3 vols.

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