With My Own Hand by Ashley Douglas
'A really thrilling discovery . . . This is a real extension of our knowledge of women of the period, engagingly told' - Philippa Gregory
'It held me captive from the first page to the last. Utterly breathtaking' - Tracy Borman
The youngest of the Maitland siblings, Marie had watched her elder sisters be married off one by one, destined to take up the unavoidable path for women in sixteenth-century Scotland. However, as she neared marrying age, her father, an influential judge, poet and Keeper of the Privy Seal under Mary, Queen of Scots, went blind and suddenly needed someone to act as his scribe and secretary. In taking up this role, Marie indeed avoided the unavoidable, dedicating her life to her father's work. After his death, she put the finishing touches on the Maitland Quarto, long recognised as significant for its preservation of the poetry of the male great-and-good of sixteenth-century Scotland.
A rare feat for a woman at the time, but Marie's story doesn't stop there. For hidden in the pages of the Maitland Quarto, historian and translator Ashley Douglas discovered Marie's own secret lesbian love poetry. Penning such poetry in the hostile climate of post-Reformation Scotland, with its suffocating tightening of moral control over society, was an incredible act of bravery. Unable to sign it directly, Marie, insistent on her voice and love being known, littered the manuscript with clues to its true penmanship. Clues that, until now, have remained unseen.
Building on her initial discovery of Marie's poetry, in With My Own Hand Ashley Douglas draws on a vast range of newly unearthed primary historical records to tell the fascinating story of Marie and her manuscript, in full, for the very first time.
'With My Own Hand is a beautiful tribute to a woman lost to time, a work of history as courageous as its subject . . . Douglas has given us a gift in these pages. We need more historians like her' - Leah Redmond Chang
Though a work of non-fiction, this is a teasing and tantalising historical drama, beautifully written by Douglas -- Sass MacDonald
With My Own Hand is a necessary act of queer historical reclamationIn recovering Marie Maitland from the margins of manuscript culture, Ashley Douglas does more than reconstruct a life: she demonstrates that women's same-sex desire was part of the lived and articulated reality of the early modern world. At a time when the legitimacy of queer lives is again contested in public discourse, this return to a sixteenth-century woman who loved women feels not antiquarian but urgent. The power of the book lies in its archival seriousness, in its patient reading of documents, contexts and silences, and in its refusal to allow women's desire to be footnoted or euphemised out of history. This is not simply biography; it is the restoration of a lineage. Douglas reminds us that queer history survives not by accident, but because someone chooses to look for it. An important and timely contribution to the history of women who loved women -- Christopher Stephens, author of The Light of Day
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781035430604 |
| ISBN 10 | 1035430606 |
| Title | With My Own Hand |
| Author | Ashley Douglas |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Headline Publishing Group |
| Year published | 2026-07-16 |
| Number of pages | 304 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |