regshoe

My new favourite theory about the Appin murder: actually, Mungo Campbell [Colin the Fox's nephew and the only eyewitness to the murder] did it!


This looks like a very worthy project, and the blog is full of the sort of detailed book nerdery I love. A bit of digging suggests they have published an edition of Kidnapped, and it differs in some surprising ways from previous versions of the text (David sets out not from Essendean, but the less romantic 'Ogilvy'); I am eager to see what further light it might shed on the vexed question of how old David is and what time it was when Ransome was murdered, but it seems to be sadly difficult to get hold of. As it is, the blog has a few fun meta posts about the book.

('Ogilvy' is pretty interesting, actually—the name of a prominent Jacobite family, and so another piece of the Jacobitism in Davie's background that complicates the simple Jacobite-Whig dichotomy... Both the original magazine text and the first book edition have 'Essendean', so I suppose it comes from the manuscript, and can only guess at this editor's reasons for preferring it. I'm not sure why it's less romantic than Essendean, though?)


I meant to share this when I posted the last set of D. K. Broster papers, but in the excitement of 'The Daughter of the House' I forgot: If you don't feel like reading the 9,000 or so words of very obscure French Royalist history in 'The Happy Warrior', here's a passage which may be of wider interest on female/AFAB soldiers in the French army:

He witnessed the horrors of the sack of Thuin—largely the work of the Hungarians, Croats and Wallachians—and, a few days afterwards, cut down in self-defence a French foot soldier who, as he was preparing to give him the coup de grace, called out, “Mercy! I am a woman.” It was true. The young man had her conveyed to a convent at Thuin, and went next day to see her; there was no hope of saving her. She had followed her lover to the war. It was not very unusual for women to fight in the French ranks, and among the émigrés themselves was a certain Chevalier de Haussey with her husband, passing as his brother. The ‘Chevalier’ was cited as a model of every soldierly virtue—“she was ugly enough for a man,” observes Neuilly ungallantly—and though her sex was suspected no one dared to make any allusion to it. She buried her husband with her own hands at the defence of the canal of Louvain, was captured at Quiberon, condemned to death and saved by some Breton women. Neuilly saw her again in 1814, still wearing man’s attire, in the Palais-Royal; she was a Chevalier de St. Louis[1].

[1]Her real name was de Bennes, and her full story may be read in Comte Gérard de Contades’ Emigres et Chouans.

(The book referred to is available here, if anyone who can read French would like to investigate further!)


once_upon_fic nominations are open! I'm trying to decide on ballads with interesting fic potential...

Christmas Day in a Little Hospital, a descriptive piece about Christmas on a children's hospital ward.

Northern Spring, a description of spring in the Perthshire Highlands.

The Swiss Ambassador and Mme de Vérans's Fan, a slightly mysterious unfinished short story. (Challenge to the fandom: write an ending for it!)

Charon's Coward, a French Royalist story featuring the return of Fortuné de la Vireville. (But no spoilers for Sir Isumbras; it can be read independently.)

And a newspaper obituary of Broster, including a description of her funeral alongside a summary of her literary career.

I've also collected and typed up The Happy Warrior, Broster's short-story-length partial biography of Ange-Achille-Charles Brunet de Neuilly, a minor figure in French Royalist history; pending permission from St Hilda's, I hope to publish this as a mini-ebook on Gutenberg.

I may have mentioned before that, after D. K. Broster's death in 1950, Gertrude Schlich placed an 'In Memoriam' notice in The Times on the anniversary every year until her own death in 1969. (IIRC it was ethelmay who first found this out—thank you!) I had come across a couple of these notices in my biographical researches, but only now decided to have a properly thorough look in The Times Digital Archive for all of them—and I found them, indeed there every year on 7 February (or the 8th, in years when the 7th fell on a Sunday) from 1951 to 1968.

From 1952 onwards the notices all have very similar wording; they're all minor variations on this:

BROSTER.—To the dear memory of DOROTHY KATHLEEN (D. K. Broster), who died on the 7th February, 1950.—G.S.

But the very first one, from 7 February 1951, one year after Broster's death, is quite different.

Here's what it says:

BROSTER.—To the dear memory of D.K.B., died Feb. 7, 1950. “Gone . . . where an enemy never entered, and from whence a friend never went away.”

♥