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A review by justabean_reads
The Prisoner of St Kilda: The True Story of the Unfortunate Lady Grange by Margaret Macaulay
2.5
The curse of way too much non-fiction: interesting subject, mediocre writing. In this case, it was to the point where I was really wondering what her editor's notes were like, or if the author got any.
This is a short look at Lady Grange, the wife of a minor Jacobite noble who was so loudly unhappy about her husband cheating on her that said husband decided to have her kidnapped and imprisoned in the outer Hebrides, where she eventually died. This caused less scandal than one would think, because humans are the absolute worst. Most of the book is based on the two letters Lady Grange was able to smuggle to her lawyer (the second of these included in full in an appendix), padded out with a few other contemporary letters and diaries, plus some oral histories collected a hundred years later. The latter are generally compared and evaluated for likeliness in a manner that seemed pretty balanced. We also get thumbnails of pretty well everyone who entered the story, to varying degrees of relevance.
Macaulay is staunchly pro-Lady Grange, which seems fair given how she was treated by pretty well everyone, but is perhaps over explained. I feel like she could've trusted her modern readers to take Lady Grange's side, rather than constantly reminding us that we do so. Macaulay's also oddly stingy with her primary sources. She frequently refers to diaries and letters, but often either doesn't quote directly or only quotes snippets, even when they seem like they should be there. It has the effect of making her points unclear or disjointed. For example, there's quite a bit of hinting that one of the reasons for kidnapping Lady Grange was that she was going to out her husband as a Jacobite (something that had gotten his brother exiled for life, and could've gotten him hanged), but this is almost breezed past with no evidence, as though we all understood what happened? What? Given it was a slender volume already, I don't see why we couldn't have gotten more/longer quotes, or at least quotes organised in a more sensible fashion.
Anyway, great topic, would've liked a longer, less muddled take on the same subject.
This is a short look at Lady Grange, the wife of a minor Jacobite noble who was so loudly unhappy about her husband cheating on her that said husband decided to have her kidnapped and imprisoned in the outer Hebrides, where she eventually died. This caused less scandal than one would think, because humans are the absolute worst. Most of the book is based on the two letters Lady Grange was able to smuggle to her lawyer (the second of these included in full in an appendix), padded out with a few other contemporary letters and diaries, plus some oral histories collected a hundred years later. The latter are generally compared and evaluated for likeliness in a manner that seemed pretty balanced. We also get thumbnails of pretty well everyone who entered the story, to varying degrees of relevance.
Macaulay is staunchly pro-Lady Grange, which seems fair given how she was treated by pretty well everyone, but is perhaps over explained. I feel like she could've trusted her modern readers to take Lady Grange's side, rather than constantly reminding us that we do so. Macaulay's also oddly stingy with her primary sources. She frequently refers to diaries and letters, but often either doesn't quote directly or only quotes snippets, even when they seem like they should be there. It has the effect of making her points unclear or disjointed. For example, there's quite a bit of hinting that one of the reasons for kidnapping Lady Grange was that she was going to out her husband as a Jacobite (something that had gotten his brother exiled for life, and could've gotten him hanged), but this is almost breezed past with no evidence, as though we all understood what happened? What? Given it was a slender volume already, I don't see why we couldn't have gotten more/longer quotes, or at least quotes organised in a more sensible fashion.
Anyway, great topic, would've liked a longer, less muddled take on the same subject.