Roddy Lumsden Reviews the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women

The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women

As a promise of thoroughness in a reference book, a contributor list of six pages is a good sign, and this is what we find at the beginning of The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, first published last year and recently issued in soft cover edition by Edinburgh University Press. The hardback retailed at a hefty £60 (though justified by the huge amount of work involved) and therefore many general readers may have given it a miss, leaving it to institutions and reference rooms to purchase copies. This is a shame as it is not just an admirable venture, but an instructive and amiable companion for many hours of browsing.

The risk with biographical dictionaries is that they perform their task as a reference source, but stay resolutely on the shelf between required scannings. A book like this could have been a trawl through one worthy but less than sparkling educationalist or missionary after another. Instead, I found myself inflicted by the minor trauma one suffers in reading a good reference tome – head full of page numbers to flick to next, fingers in an implausible tort, keeping pages marked, making notes on a newspaper of entries to check out later.

To achieve this readability, the editors (one of whom, Sue Innes, sadly died before the project's completion) have widened the scope. There are many entries on those who became known in the expected professions and callings: the arts, the kirk, education and health. Plenty of room too to celebrate those who, in many ways, aided and encouraged improvements in the lives of women. Another important strand, the diaspora, is covered, as is shown by the healthy number of contributors from overseas (esp Canada and Australia) in that contributor list. But there are also unexpected categories of women included here.

For instance, the editors chose to include biographies of women who did not achieve fame: as the editorial preface explains, “those whose story in some way represented areas of Scottish life or economy, where women were generally present but rarely individually recorded.” These entries, which include the lives of a herring gutter, shepherd, weaver, midwife etc are some of the most interesting here. All the stories of social reform and philanthropy (I was pleased to find three of my distant relatives – Katherine, Rachel and Louisa Lumsden - acknowledged in these areas) are offset by the inclusion of women of ill fame or unfortunate renown – including Alice Keppel, the royal mistress, who I did not know was a Scot. There is a large number of women who were accused of witchcraft and often punished severely. Criminals and victims are recorded here too. Another unlikely category is mythical / fictional and no one, surely, will grudge Maw Broon, the nation's conscience in a mince-stained pinny, her half column here.

Among other possibly fictional characters is 'the wife of Argentocoxos', a Caledonian chieftain's spouse who history has recorded as telling the wife of a vanquishing Roman leader that the communal family way (and communal mating habits) of her people were far more civilised than the debauched Roman way of the kept wife. Then there are a few Edinburgh worthies about whom we are unsure – Jenny Geddes, who may have started a riot in St Giles in 1637 and 'Lucky' Wood, whom Ramsay wrote of so praisingly, both in a poem and in prose, claiming that the decline of the Canongate in the early 18^th century was due to the loss of the Parliament and the death of this woman, supposedly the cleanest and most honest innkeeper in the city. Her near namesake 'Lucky' Log, who lived a century later was, alas, all too real. This Irish navvy's wife was the brains behind the body snatching gang which included her second husband William Hare. Though it was probably her idea to switch from robbing corpses to creating them, the mores of the time (women were generally considered incapable of evil) meant that she escaped punishment.

One last sub-category caught my eye – those women who, for a variety of reasons lived some of their lives in the guise of a man. Most famed of these is 'James Barry', still, and likely to continue to be, the subject of debate among historians. The story in a nutshell is that Barry lived her life as a man from her late teens and made a fine career, travelling the world as a pioneering army doctor. Her secret was not revealed until she died. However Barry (who was not Scottish but spent her student years there) may have been a man with some intersexual characteristics and undeveloped genitals who was raised as a girl – we may never know. No doubt about Isobel Gunn who spent a stretch of her twenties working for the Hudson Bay Company in Canada until she gave birth, exposing her gender. Then there is Mary Dods who achieved some success as a writer under male names and decided to take this a stage further in her mid-thirties when she hooked up with a teenage beauty. When the girl became unexpectedly pregnant, Mary cross-dressed, became 'Walter Sholto Douglas' and lived for some time in France as man and wife with the girl, who sadly turned out to prefer actual men.

• Read three sample entries: Isabel Gunn, Jennie Trout, Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall