This article was published in the Dundee Courier & Advertiser of Tuesday 26 June 1928, and gives a fascinating insight into some details of D. K. Broster’s life, her travels in the Highlands and her reception by contemporary Scottish readers. Thanks to scintilla10 for sending me a copy of the paper!
The Highlander or even the Lowlander of Scotland who has not read “The Flight of the Heron” and “The Gleam in the North” must, I am sure, be one of a small minority.
D. K. Broster is for most of us a name to conjure with, for she has made the ’45 Rising and the years of its aftermath into a living story of our own people.
Imagine, therefore, our excitement when a friend casually announced that D. K. Broster had just arrived at his hotel. In answer to our quick barrage of questions we elicited no definite information save that the lady had the loveliest speaking voice. Our friend, who is a fisher and no book-lover, except of those concerning Arctic expeditions, declared he could sit and listen to her for hours with the greatest of pleasure.
This statement we confirmed for ourselves within 24 hours. Miss Broster, paying now her fifth visit to the Highlands, carries the music of cultured Oxford speech in every tone of her pleasant voice. And the matter of her speech has much of the same charm.
Here in a backwater of north-west Perthshire we are remote from universities and schools. Miss Broster brings with her the assimilated atmosphere of books and all the delight that that magic word stands for. She is in nature and by education a historian. Her imagination has been captured by the romance of history, and the first-class brain working behind that imagination has gathered in from formal histories, from state papers, from every conceivable source, oral and otherwise, a mass of historical facts and details that her vivid and colourful imagination has been so wonderfully able to transmute into the glowing, breathing stories of Ewen Cameron and of Dr Archibald. This marriage of brain and imaginantion strikes one most forcibly in the conversation of Miss Broster.
Lochaber, I am afraid, has her first love, and the thoroughness with which she has evidently explored it explains in some measure the vividness of description in the opening chapters, for example, of “The Heron”. Yet room remains, perhaps, in her heart for the wild loneliness of Rannoch Moor, and the peaceful beauty of the Perthshire hills and glens.
Between the sheltered inland lochs and the stormy wind-tossed arms of the Western Sea she hesitates. Both have a strong pull at the heart-strings, and both figure largely in our Highland history. The more sophisticated Highland resort—complete with Hydro—has no appeal. For her the wide moors, and the high white tops and the blue lochans cradled among the hills.
Miss Broster’s next story will be awaited with interest. “The Dark Mile,” third of her Highland novels, will be published in book form in February.
Here the hero is Iain [sic] Stewart of Appin, cousin of Ardroy. Appin and Lochaber are alike familiar to Miss Broster, and every house in both distrrets is open to her. Ardshiel, house of Stewart memories, and Achnacarry, of the Camerons, have equally united to give her welcome. Lochiel himself was her guide to the home of his ancestors and the many treasures therein contained. She has captured the very spirit of the Highlands, and from chiefs like the Cameron to ghillies like Angus MacMartin honour and admiration are hers without asking. Can the Highlands, I wonder, dare claim that the drop of Celtic blood in her makes her akin?
Many of us fight shy of women’s books, but no man hesitates to give Miss Broster his fullest and enthusiastic praise. There is something in her writing and in her personality of the virtues claimed usually by man—the love of a clear issue, the claims of straight clean friendship, a directness of thought and of speech and of action that are wholly contradictory to the accusations levelled against women authors of tortuous reasonings and twisted threads of motives and results.
A Highlander in far-off Venice, reading “The Heron” for the first time, wrote home post haste asking who the devil was this man Broster who got so equally under the skin of the Highlander Cameron and the English Windham. The cleverness with which the friendship—wholly masculine—between the two men of different nationalities misled him utterly. And indeed many a reader, I am sure, imagined that D. was perhaps for David, but never for Dorothy.
E. E.