Sylvia Robertson

This is a slight but quietly devastating biography of a brilliant young Victorian woman out of step with her era and, if not her whole family, at least her mother (who appears cruelly unsympathetic) and her father who didn’t or couldn’t fight for her.

Lady Evelyn Stuart Murray (1868 – 1940) was the daughter of John 7th Duke of Atholl (1840 – 1917) and his wife Duchess Louise (d. 1902). Evelyn was a fearsomely clever young girl, an autodidact, almost devouring Gaelic. Her father was delighted by her learning. ‘Dear, I can’t say how pleased I am to see that you take an interest in the language. It is the one thing I have longed for all your lives, that you should all take pleasure in learning the language of our forefathers, now alas fast passing away.’

When Evelyn began to roam the countryside and cottages conversing in Gaelic and collecting folk tales her mother was less approving of this hobby. Between February and November 1891 Evelyn collected 240 tales. As Evelyn had acquired tales and books (not just Gaelic but Scots, Irish Gaelic, Breton and Manx) her mother became anxious to put an end to her daughter’s increasingly conspicuous intellectual pursuits.

Any attempt to contain Evelyn’s studies was met with implacable opposition and her mother grew weary of the battle. Duchess Louise was the sister of Harriet Mordaunt, who was divorced and supposedly insane, so perhaps she viewed Evelyn through the prism of her sister’s fate and dreaded what would become of Evelyn. One sensible female acquaintance suggested that Evelyn try for Girton or Newnham but this was vetoed. Instead, banishment from her beloved Blair Atholl and exile were enforced brutally. Her mother told her, ‘that I was not fit to be in the house with any of you … I was told I would not even be allowed to remain in the country. I daresay I might have given everybody the plague if I did.’

In secret, incognito and with an assumed name Evelyn went abroad. Ill, anxious and painfully thin from her previous bouts of anorexia Evelyn began a second equally brilliant career devoting herself to needlework and embroidery. Perhaps it was a far more ladylike occupation for Duchess Louise but carried to brilliance. There was eventually a reconciliation; while Evelyn did not see her mother again, she was reunited with her siblings. After her death in 1940 while her books and embroidery were bequeathed to her birth family everything else was left to a female friend of her exile, her chosen family.

This moving biography warns readers of the dangers of convention and inherited traditions, of the wrongness of crushing brilliance, of living how you want (and must) and that alone and vulnerable women must sometimes struggle to fulfil their talents. It is an important and vital book.… (mais)