Some commentary on where The Flight of the Heron came from: what were D. K. Broster’s sources of inspiration for the book, and how she came to write it.
See also Typescript 2 in Writings of D. K. Broster, where Broster gives more detail on the subject; this page was written before I read the typescript.
First of all, here’s what D. K. Broster herself has to say about the origin of The Flight of the Heron. This is from a letter written for The Horn Book Magazine in late 1928 or early 1929:
Until three years ago my books had all had either an entirely or a partially French setting. But in 1923, as it happened, I paid a first visit to Lochaber, that district in the Western Highlands of Scotland so saturated with memories of the last Jacobite Rebellion of the “Forty-five.” I was there five weeks (in almost constant rain) and had not when I went the slightest intention of writing about the Forty-five, which, as an overwritten period and one which I knew very little about, rather bored me. But the spirit of the place got such a hold upon me that before I left I had the whole story planned almost in spite of myself. Directly I came south I started to read for it.
And this is from The Dictionary of Literary Biography’s entry on Broster, which quotes from another document held in the Archive of St Hilda’s College, Oxford:
The picture in her mind that proved the seed for the book was the scene from the middle of the book “where my English hero Keith Windham rescues my Scottish one, Ewen Cameron, from being shot by the English redcoats after Culloden in front of a mountain shieling.” She ruefully comments that she had great trouble with Windham, “who refused to be called anything but Keith, though he was not a Scot, and in fact disliked them.”
Broster’s statement that she knew very little about and was bored by Jacobite history until being inspired to write The Flight of the Heron... appears not to be quite true. In fact, although The Flight of the Heron was her first novel with a Jacobite setting, she had written about the Jacobites—and Scottish history more broadly—at some length before. One of her earliest published short stories, ’Mongst All Foes (1902), features not only Jacobites but various story elements which will be very familiar to fans of The Flight of the Heron: honour, terrible dilemmas, noble tragedy, hurt/comfort, swordfights, and most tellingly of all a significant, homoerotic friendship between enemies. Another early short story, The Questionable Parentage of Basil Grant (1905), contains various comedic references to Scottish history and the Jacobites. At least two of the chapter epigraphs in her first novel Chantemerle (1911; co-written with G. W. Taylor) are from Jacobite-related sources (chapter XIII from the poem ‘The Poor Jacobites’ by K. T. Hinkson; chapter XXII from the Jacobite song ‘Bessy’s Haggies’), and another Jacobite epigraph appears in The Wounded Name (1922; chapter IV, from the Jacobite song ‘Here’s His Health in Water’). Besides all this evidence that Broster actually knew quite a bit about Jacobite history, there’s her own statement that she had ‘the whole story planned’ before she began doing detailed research for the book: given how closely the plot relies on the events of the ’45, that wouldn’t have been possible without a reasonably solid knowledge of the history!
The Flight of the Heron is dedicated to Violet Jacob ‘in homage’. Jacob was a Scottish poet, author and amateur historian; while I’m not aware that Broster ever explained the significance of the dedication, it’s very likely that it’s in reference to Jacob’s 1911 novel Flemington, which features a fraught and meaningful relationship between two men, one a Jacobite and one a Whig, who meet a few times over the course of the ’45, culminating in tragedy. Now, this doesn’t prove that Broster was inspired by Flemington, but the similarity plus the dedication is certainly strong circumstantial evidence that this book had some kind of an influence on The Flight of the Heron.
So to put all this together and sum up the probable influences on The Flight of the Heron’s genesis and composition, I would say something like: Broster had some degree of existing interest in the Jacobites and the ’45, as shown by her previous writing about them and her familiarity with and use of Jacobite poetry and songs. Probably she also read Flemington at some point, and its ideas and themes struck her as interesting ones, generally and within their historical context. Then in 1923 she went on that Highland holiday, visiting some of the locations that she would later use in the novel, and ‘the spirit of the place’ combined with all the stuff already in her mind about the Jacobites—her historical knowledge; the songs and poems; Flemington; the suitability of the ’45 as a stage for her favourite themes of honour, close male friendships and hurt/comfort—to produce the idea for the novel. It began with the scene of Keith rescuing Ewen outside the shieling hut on Beinn Laoigh (elsewhere in the Horn Book Magazine letter quoted above, Broster says that most of her stories began this way, with a single vivid and as-yet-contextless image), and over the course of her holiday, she built up the plot around this. Then she began on her research reading—and, well, the rest is history.