Henrietta Keddie

Essayist, Historian & Novelist | 1827-1914

Henrietta Keddie (1827-1914) grew up in a large and not particularly prosperous family just outside of Cupar. She was aware of the limitations of her experiences, recalling in Three Generations of a Scottish Family, “We could not afford to go far from home unless for some definite and rather important object. Travelling for pleasure or even for information was never thought of” (220). Books, which Keddie and her siblings borrowed from the village library and the contents of two libraries at her disposal, “Books for children were soon exhausted,” and she “progressed betimes to books for the ‘grown-ups’, happily, for the most part, into the entirely wholesome as well as the enchanting ‘Waverley Novels’” (182). Keddie and her sisters took turns reading while the others sewed, and it was a natural result of her “book-ridden childhood” that Keddie turned to what she called “scribbling” her own stories (186). However, she didn’t attempt to publish any of her scribbles for some years.

After their father’s death, Keddie and her sisters “combined forces, and began a school for girls,” an endeavor to which they were driven by economic necessity. The school flourished, and Keddie found time to write, publishing her first novel XXXX under the pseudonym Sarah Tytler in 1852. It, and its successor, “fell flat” and she “received no renumeration” (254). It was only when she began “to amplify and put new life into some of the traditions with which the countryside abounded” that she found success (255). She published the first of these traditional stories in Fraser’s Magazine, a venue she continued to publish in on-and-off for the next 17 years (255). She also contributed to Cornhill Magazine, Good Words, and The Sunday Magazine (257).

Her literary work required Keddie to visit London to consult with her publishers, Strahan and Ibister. In 1870, following the deaths of her mother and two of her sisters, Keddie and her remaining sister Margaret closed down their school and moved to London for the “further betterment” of Keddie’s career. Keddie was proud to publish with Strahan and Ibister because they “raised intellectually the whole serial religious literature of the period” (344), in part by founding the Contemporary Review and the Nineteenth Century, two magazines that, in Keddie’s opinion, had “less political bias, and more human-heartedness, and a keener desire for truth than existed in the old Tory and Whig magazines and reviews” (344).

Keddie claimed that her accomplishments as an author “may be summed up as a good many novels, historical and present-day stories for girls, historical sketches, a people’s ‘Life of Queen Victoria’, and a ‘Life of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon’, which included the lives of Lady Glenorchy and other remarkable women among Lady Huntingdon’s contemporaries” (344). She neglects to mention her informative books on art history, Scottish song, and other topics, which owed their existence to her time spent as a teacher for middle-class girls in Cupar.