Robina F. Hardy

Robina Forrester Hardy (1835-1891) predominantly wrote about Scottish life for a young audience. She came from a highly influential family: her maternal grandfather was the treasurer of the Bank of Scotland, and her paternal grandfather was Rev. Dr Hardy, minister of the High Church, Edinburgh, who served as moderator of the General Assembly. She had at least one brother and one sister.

Hardy was deeply religious and she conducted christian missionary work in some of the most impoverished parts of Edinburgh. Hardy regularly volunteered with poor communities in Grassmarket and Vennel. These experiences made their way into her writings, and her story of the Grassmarket slums appeared in Jock Halliday, a Grassmarket Hero (1883). Hardy was the editor of Morning Rays, a Church of Scotland magazine for children. She also contributed to the People’s Friend, Sunday Magazine, and the Sun. One of her earliest publications was a poetry collection Whin-Bloom (1879)

Hardy found friends and co-authors in fellow Scottish writers Jessie Saxby and Annie Swan. Swan describes Hardy in her autobiography as ‘couthy, kind, and genial [...] a delightful creature, full of wit and kindly humanity. It did you good even to look at her’ (p. 51). And like Saxby and Swan she was mentioned in Edward’s Salmon’s survey of children’s literature from the late 19th century, Juvenile Literature As It Is. Salmon wrote that Hardy ‘has given boys and girls glimpses of their Scottish cousins, and especially of those whose lives are passed in Edinburgh’ (p. 152).

Hardy’s work has been linked to the kailyard school. In her ‘Old Saloon’ column in Blackwood’s Magazine, Margaret Oliphant dismissed Hardy’s and Annie Swan’s work. Oliphant name-checked Hardy’s novel Glenairlie: or, The Last of the Graemes (1884) as one of the ‘cheap books, perfectly well adapted, with their mild love-stories and abundant marriages, for the simpler classes’ (p. 265-6).

After Hardy's death in 1891, Swan and Saxby penned a memorial booklet of their friend. Hardy never married, and she is buried in the Canongate Kirkyard in Edinburgh.

Contributed by: Lois Burke