With My Own Hand by Ashley Douglas review: 'curious and illuminating'

Ashley Douglas | Contributed

There is much that is curious and illuminating in this book by Ashley Douglas, subtitled “The secret life of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s sixteenth century Sappho”, but one thing is curious for a rather more perturbing reason. I normally don’t comment on design but the back jacket flap has a “portrait” of Marie Maitland along with the usual puffs. In an afterword, Douglas writes that she and her wife commissioned a portrait of Maitland, drawing on contemporary clothing and existing images of her family. Unfortunately, to my eye, it looks like AI generated slop (I am not saying it definitively is, only that it has that plasticky sheen). The image was for use through the Time for Inclusive Education campaign and made available in their curriculum materials; a further note says the image is “entirely copyright to me, Ashley Douglas”. The tone is oddly proprietorial; the plea for statues and plaques is understandable but there are quite a few other Scottish female lesbian writers who might equally be considered worthy of commemoration. Douglas writes “It should never have taken a part-time historian with a day job, who also happens to be a gay woman, stumbling upon Marie’s poetry for its significance to be excitedly shouted from the rooftops.”

Marie Maitland was probably born around 1550, the daughter of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington and Thirlstane, a poet, jurist and courtier. He had a remarkably long life for the period, dying in 1586 at the age of 89 or 90. Marie did not: she died 1596. Sir Richard went blind and Marie was his amanuensis for two significant Scottish manuscripts of the Reformation period; the Maitland Folio and the Maitland Quarto. The latter anthology also included her own poetry, and it seems indisputable that some of them are love poems addressed by a woman to a woman. It is conspicuous that it is coded with examples: David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi in the Old Testament; Theseus and Pirithous and Achilles and Patroclus from classical myth. This shows that as an aristocratic woman, and more importantly at the time at least an unmarried one, she had the benefits of a classical education. It seems likely as well, given her litigious wranglings, she learnt something of her father’s legal understanding.

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The Maitlands were a fascinating family, and Marie’s brother William would become “Secretary Lethington” to Mary, Queen of Scots. He was lampooned as “the Chameleon” by the great George Buchanan and referred to as “Michael Wylie” in a pun on Machiavelli. This seems to be a family trait, as his younger brother becomes Lord Chancellor to James VI (Scottish families were very good at playing both sides, as in Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae.) He uses his unmarried sister as a pawn in a later dispute where she is married off to Alexander Lauder of Haltoun. As Douglas writes, “Through the marriage of Alexander and Marie, a persecuted son was confirmed in his patrimony, a cruel father and his nefarious kin were neutralised, and a stubborn, albeit abused wife was persuaded to drop her divorce action. By bartering away his sister’s hand – an asset that had, of course, only recently become available to him since his father’s death – Secretary Maitland solved… the political headache of the Lauders”. Marie does not seem to be writing much thereafter and dies, predictably enough, in childbirth.

The problem with private lives is that by their nature they are private and leave few records. We can’t really know what Marie made of her marriage. We can contextualise it in a way which might jar with some of Douglas’s other pronouncements. The Reformation, she writes, caused a “moral clampdown” with “private lives policed like never before, with zealous neighbour breathing down their necks and rabid Church authorities”. Later she says “the new world order, as embodied by the figure of John Knox, was underpinned by intemperate, moralising zeal in general… and misogyny in particular”. Marie is stranded in “the severe culture of Calvinist Scotland”. But the point of the notorious “First Blast against the monstrous regimen” – note, regimen, not regiment – is that a female ruler would be overruled by a male consort. Which is exactly what happened to Mary and exactly what Elizabeth’s brinksmanship avoided. The Reformation – as well as the beginnings of universal education, poor relief and health care – allowed women the possibility - slight, but a possibility nonetheless – of an option other than marriage or the convent.

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Was Marie the Scottish Sappho? Indeed, had she read any? There were editions in French assembled by Henri Estienne but there was much more in Latin literature which we can be sure she knew. Catullus 51 is an adaptation of Sappho’s 31st Fragment, and there are scattered hints in Juvenal, Statius and Horace. But she would definitely have know Heroides 15 by Ovid, where Sappho expresses her love for Phaon (unfortunately a man).

There is much to admire here, even if the hand is sometimes somewhat overplayed. Perhaps my favourite parts were about the handwriting data, especially Marie’s double signature, a true mark of assertion. It also links to the question about whether either the Maitland Folio or Quarto were ever intended for publication. Like the Bannatyne Manuscript I think there is good evidence that what they were actually doing was imitating the look of printed books. They were never coming out to a wider audience.

With My Own Hand, by Ashley Douglas, Headline Press, £22

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