Ethel Forster Heddle
Novelist & Short Fiction Writer | 1863-1942
Ethel Forster Heddle (1863-1942) was one of ten children born in St. Andrews to physician and geologist Matthew Forster Heddle and Jane Sinclair MacKechnie. An 1891 census record, from when Ethel was aged 28, shows that she was still living at home with her father, unmarried, and listed as being an ‘authoress.’ She eventually married William Marshall, another St Andrews University scientist, and they lived in St Andrews with their daughter Clemency and son John. Heddle’s son was born in Java, where she set her novel Strangers in the Land (1903), but St Andrews remained Heddle’s home. The fictional town of ‘St Rule’ appears in several of her books, which is based on the town. She died aged 79 in her home on Queens Gardens in St Andrews.
Heddle wrote 21 novels, two of which were published under her married name, Ethel F. H. Marshall. Most of these, including The Mystery of St. Rules (1902) and Girl Comrades (1907) were adventure stories for girls, similar to those of her better-known contemporary, Angela Brazil. But she also wrote novels about young career women, such as Three Girls in a Flat (1896), and Kailyard sketches of Scottish life such as Marget at the Manse (1899).
In 1896 Ethel Heddle published Three Girls in a Flat, a novel that tells the story of three young women who decide to live together in a flat in Chelsea and try to earn a living as writers. The novel is said to be based on the real-life experience of Ménie Muriel Dowie, Alice Werner and Lilias Campbell Davidson, all thoroughly modern women. Dowie had travelled across the Karpathian mountains in Eastern Europe alone on horseback and published her account of this experience, Alice Werner was later a professor of Swahili and Bantu languages, and Lillias Campbell Davidson was the American founder of the British Lady Cyclists' Association. Heddle and Dowie knew each other as their mothers were friends; they would discuss writing when Heddle visited Dowie’s house in Kinross-shire. In the winter of 1889-90 Heddle and Dowie lived in an apartment together in Paris.
Heddle’s writing regularly appeared in both regional and national periodicals, like the Home Messenger, the Scotsman, Cassell’s Magazine, the People’s Friend, the British Girls’ Annual and the Falkirk Herald. She was a regular contributor to the girls’ magazine The Young Woman, edited by Frederick A. Atkins. In The Young Woman Ethel published articles on girlhood life, leisure, and concerns, in a column entitled ‘Between Ourselves: a friendly chat with the girls.’ She would answer a range of correspondents; she especially gave feedback on girls’ literary submissions, and occasionally contributed an original story to the magazine.
In The Young Woman girl writers appealed to Heddle’s specifically Scottish authorial expertise in their correspondence. Moreover, Heddle used Scots vernacular and references to Scottish literature and history in her column and stories; one of her stories was entitled ‘Wae's Me for Prince Charlie’ which is based on a Jacobite broadside ballad of the same name.
Contributed by Lois Burke.
Bibliography
Jad Adams, ‘Ménie Muriel Dowie: The "Modern" Woman of Choices,’ English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 58.3 (2015): 313-340.
Charles Ferrral and Anna Jackson, Juvenile Literature and British Society: The Age of Adolescence (Routledge: 2021).
Hamish H. Johnston, ‘Matthew Forster Heddle (1828–1897), Scottish mineralogist: His life story’, Journal of the Russell Society, volume 17, 2014, pp. 3-15.
Emma Liggins, “The Life of a Bachelor Girl in the Big City”: Selling the Single Lifestyle to Readers of Woman and the Young Woman in the 1890s’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 40.3 (216-238).
Sally Mitchell, ‘Careers for Girls: Writing Trash’ Victorian Periodicals Review, 25.3 (1992), 109-113.