Isabella Fyvie Mayo
Essayist, Novelist & Translator | 1843-1914
Isabella Fyvie Mayo (1843-1914) was born in London to Scottish parents. Her father, a baker who came from a family of farmers in Aberdeenshire, died when Fyvie was nine. The family struggled to keep the bakery going, but by the time Fyvie was seventeen, they were deeply in debt. Aware of the difficulty of making a living as a writer, but anxious to contribute to the upkeep of the family, Fyvie sold embroidery to the women who kept stalls at the Soho Bazaar, making 1s 6d a week for her handiwork (69). Between 1862 and 1867, Fyvie held a series of secretarial positions while publishing poems and stories in evangelical magazines including Youth’s Magazine, The Family Herald, Good Words, The Sunday Magazine, Leisure Hour, and Kind Words.
In August of 1867, Alexander Strahan, editor of the Sunday Magazine, asked Fyvie to write a series of vignettes from the perspective of a city merchant about “the sick, the lonely, the outcast, and so forth” (142). The series, to be called “The Occupations of Retired Life,” had already been advertised as forthcoming under the pen-name Edward Garrett, a pseudonym under which Fyvie would continue to publish fiction. Following the success of the series, Fyvie wrote exclusively for The Sunday Magazine until 1873. She married John Mayo, a solicitor, in 1870, but he died in 1877. The following year, Fyvie Mayo moved to Aberdeen, where she supported herself and her son by taking in lodgers and publishing work in religious and family magazines.
Lindy Moore has uncovered 38 serialized novels, over 160 stories, and more than 360 articles and reviews authored by Fyvie Mayo and published in over 70 periodicals. Moore has traced the development of Fyvie Mayo’s liberal Christian socialism as she began to write critically about racial prejudice in Britain and the United States. In xxx, Fyvie Mayo co-founded the Society for the Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man, an organization that campaiged against racial discrimination through its publication, Fraternity. During the 1890s, she became involved in radical, socialist networks and was key in popularizing Tolstoy’s thought in Britain.
Bibliography
Lindy Moore, “Opposing Racism and Imperialism: Isabella Fyvie Mayo’s Search for Literary Space(s), 1880-1914,” in Empires and Revolutions: Cunninghame Graham and his Conteporaries (Glasgow: ASLS, 2017), pp. 112-27.
Lindy Moore, “‘A Notable Personality’: Isabella Fyvie Mayo in the public and private spaces of Aberdeen,” Women’s History Review, 22.2 (2013), pp. 239-52.
Lindy Moore, “The Reputation of Isabella Fyvie Mayo: Interpretations of a Life,” Women’s History Review, 19 (2010), pp. 71-88.
Archive
View Isabella Fyvie Mayo’s work in our archive.