Annie Shepherd Swan
Annie Shepherd Swan (1859-1943) wrote over 200 novels, a few of which were published under her married name, Mrs. Burnett Smith, and others of which she wrote under the pseudonym, David Lyall. Swan grew up in a strongly Evangelical middle-class family just outside Edinburgh, where for a time she attended the Queen Street Ladies College. She recalls in her autobiography that the family’s reading materials included an 18 volume Penny Encyclopedia, Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs, The Bible, a few of Shakespeare’s plays, and “some bound volumes of sound magazines” including Good Words, Chambers’s, and The Sunday Magazine, (25-7). If reading for pleasure was frowned upon, authorship, Swan explains, “was not then, in certain circles, at least, considered a very respectable occupation” (32), so she wrote her earliest novels “largely in secret and in holes and corners” (31), hiding the manuscript for Aldersyde (1883), her first big success, inside a footstool.
Swan married James Burnett Smith in 1883 and supported his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh with her work. She had won a disappointing second place in a story competition run by the Dundee-based magazine, The People’s Friend, in 1878, and her first novel, Wrongs Righted, ran in the Friend in 1881. By January of 1895, when William Latto, the editor of The People’s Friend, hailed her as Scotland’s foremost novelist, Swan had published 29 novels, 14 of which had been serialized in the Friend.
After completing his medical studies, Burnett Smith opened a medical practice in London, where Swan found that “women writers were as the sands of the sea for multitude” (71). The couple had two children, Effie and Edward, and their circumstances seem to have been consistently comfortable, if not positively affluent. Swan’s story-telling talents and her carefully cultivated authorial persona as a friend and mentor to her working-class readers won the notice of William Robertson Nicolls, an Evangelical publishing magnate. In 1893, Nicolls made Swan the primary contributor of his newly established periodical The Woman At Home: Annie S. Swan’s Magazine, titled “Over the Teacups".” In 1897, Hodder & Stoughton began publishing an illustrated weekly magazine called Annie Swan’s Penny Stories, which sold 140,000 in its first week. And by 1899, Swan was contributing stories to Robertson Nicoll’s newspaper The British Weekly under the pseudonym, David Lyall. It is impossible to tell why Swan may have adopted this pseudonym, which she claims as her own in her autobiography. At a certain point, too, D.C. Thomson, owner of the People’s Friend, prohibited Swan from using the name “Annie S. Swan” without their explicit permission. She had become the company’s top selling writer and part of their brand.
In addition to writing a prodigious number of novels, Swan was active in the temperance and women’s suffrage movements and in a variety of church missions; in 1906, she was president of the Society of Women Journalists; during the First World War, she spoke to British soldiers stationed in France; from 1916 to 1918, she served as spokeswoman for the Food Administration, writing and giving speeches across Britain and the United States on the importance of food conversation; and in 1922, she stood for Parliament as Liberal candidate for the Maryhill division of Glasgow, losing to the Labour party. This last seems to have been a step too far for some of her readers. In January of 1923, one Jeannie Rough, a royal reader of The People’s Friend for 40 years, wrote from Sawyerville, Quebec to express her relief at Swan’s defeat: “All through the years you belonged to us, but when we heard you were ‘running for Parliament’ we felt we were going to lose you and when you were defeated we said ‘Praise be! She did not get in’! — We do not want our gracious womanly Annie Swan at Westminster. Three cheers for the Scotch mothers who did not vote for her!” Swans’s authorial persona as a model of domestic femininity was incompatible with Rough with public political office.
In 1908, the Burnett Smiths moved to Hereford, of which James was twice elected mayor. They also built a cottage in Kingshorn, Fife, so that their children, would grow up knowing Scotland. After her husband’s death in 1927, Swan returned permanently to Scotland, settling with her daughter Effie south of Edinburgh in Gullane, where she continued to write almost up until her death in 1943.
Swan was immensely conscious of and attentive to the particular needs of her reading audiences, and this probably explains her celebrity among the predominantly working-class readers of The People’s Friend. She described writing fiction for serial publication as “a branch, almost a profession, by itself…There must be no discursive meditations in a serial — the story is the thing, and if the author does not get on with it, he will have no vogue. Yet through the pages of magazines and newspapers a wider public can be reached; a great public, with which cannot afford, or which has never been educated to buy books, but which nevertheless must be fed” (283). Swan devoted her career as an author to feeding this public.
Bibliography
Beth Dickson, “Annie S. Swan and O. Douglas: Legacies of the Kailyard,” in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 329-346.
Kate Krueger, “The Woman at Home in the World: Annie Swan’s Lady Doctor and the Problem of the Fin de Siècle Working Woman,” Victorian Periodicals Review 50.3 (2017), pp. 517-33.
Samantha Walton, “Scottish Modernism, Kailyard Fiction, and the Woman at Home,” in Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880-1930,” ed. by K. MacDonald et al. (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 141-59.
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