Mary and Jane Findlater
Mary Findlater (1865-1963) and Jane Findlater (1866-1946), daughters of a Free Church minister, grew up in Lochearnhead Perthshire, where they inhabited the awkward position of the shabby genteel. Like so many of their protagonists, the Findlaters were too refined to work outside the home, and too poor to live a life of leisure. After their father’s death, Mary and Jane wrote their way out of poverty and out of the Highlands, moving first to Edinburgh and later south to Sussex and Cornwall with their mother and sister Sarah. The latter, according to the Findlaters’ biographer, Eileen Mackenzie, suffered from severe depression and spent a good deal of time in and out of sanatoriums. She perhaps inspired the rather remarkable number of mentally ill characters in the Findlaters’ fiction. During their years in England, the Findlater sisters developed a circle of acquaintances including Henry and William James, Mary Cholmondely, and Ellen Terry. Although their novels are row out of print, they were well known enough in their time to make two literary tours of the United States.
Individually, Jane wrote seven novels and two volumes of short stories, while Mary authored five novels and two volumes of poetry. Together, they co-authored several novels and short story collections. While Jane may have published more than Mary, her writing is also more uneven than her sister’s. Jane’s first and perhaps bets novel, The Green Graves of Balgowrie (1896), tells the story of two sisters raised in almost complete isolation by their unhinged mother. Its eighteenth-century setting accommodates the colorful characters and events that would come to seem overwrought in some of her later fiction. Mary’s style tended more to understated naturalism, even while her plots reveal the influence of Victorian sensation fiction. Her best work, The Rose of Joy (1903), explores the limitations that marriage imposes on women’s artistic and spiritual development. Its protagonist, a naïve young woman who is married almost against her will to a scoundrel, finds solace in art, and particularly in drawing detailed depictions of rural Scottish life that form visual counterparts to Mary Findlater’s literary representations of the same subject.
Crossriggs (1908) and Penny Monypenny (1911), the most successful novels that the sisters co-authored, develop the concerns of The Green Graves of Balgowrie and The Rose of Joy by exploring the bleakness of everyday life for women in small-towned Scotland. Marriage, in these novels, is a form of entrapment rather than of escape for women and men. Although they continued to write throughout the Great War, Mary’s naturalism and Jane’s sentimentalism may have seemed antiquated in the heyday of modernism. Their last collaborative novel, Beneath the Visiting Moon (1923), was published over twenty years before Jane’s death and forty years before Mary’s.
Bibliography
Douglas Gifford, “Caught between Worlds: The Fiction of Jane and Mary Findlater,” A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 291-308.
Jeanne M. Nichols, “Rediscovering the Novels of Mary and Jane Findlater,” English Literature in Transition 37.3 (1994), pp. 285-301.