Scottish Authors > Annie S Swan Novelist 1859-1943

Annie Shepherd Swan was born in Edinburgh in 1859, one of a large family which broke up on their mother's death and their father's remarriage. In 1883 Swan married a schoolmaster, James Burnett Smith, who, due to lack of money, had given up the idea of a medical career. Swan encouraged him to resume his studies, supporting him through her writing. On his graduation they moved to England, though maintaining a holiday house in Fife.

Swan's early attempts at writing were financially unrewarding, but Aidersyde (1883), her first commercially published novel, met with immediate success. Set in a small Border community, it is something of a blueprint for her later novels, with their recurrent themes of sisterly and motherly love, the virtues of a good woman, and a happy resolution of romantic problems.

She did not shrink from [his] clasp but moved nearer to him, and laid her head upon his breast. The only thought in her heart was a kind of wondering surprise that she had ever doubted him for a moment. It seemed so natural to feel his arms about her and to know she was the one woman in the world for him.

Though she had sold the copyright of Aidersyde for GBP 50.00, Swan was now assured of a public for future novels, and began a most prolific writing career.

Her books were immensely popular, and she reached an even wider readership through serial publication in The People's friend, which she regarded as the mainstay of her writing life. She was a regular contributor also to other periodicals. She claimed not to know how many books she had written, but bibliographies list over 150.

Reviewing Carlowrie (1884), Mrs Oliphant complains that Swan's novels presented an entirely distorted view of Scottish life. Swan protests in reply that she wrote almost entirely of the life she knew. Her later novels hardly support this claim, since she lived a busy and in some ways unconventional life - writing, speaking and travelling - while continuing to produce the wishfulfilment stories which her readers craved. In her autobiography My life (1934), and her Letters, collected in 1945, she appears shrewd, energetic and humorous, but she deplored "the complete overthrow of dignity and reticence" in modern fiction.

Departures from her usual style were stories for the British weekly under the pseudonym "David Lyall". Some of these, dealing with the Boer War, were thought at the time to have been written by a male war correspondent. Her most realistic novel, The Pendulum (1926), introduces problems of post World War I society: a husband admits infidelity, his wife considers divorce, and their daughter spends a weekend with her lover. Though it was published as by "Mrs Burnett Smith", her usual readers identified Swan as the author and were appalled. She did not repeat the experiment.

After her husband's death in 1927 Swan returned to Scotland, where she died at Gullane on 17th June 1943. She is seldom recognised by literary historians, but Charlotte Reid's article A Cursory visit of inspection to Annie S. Swan (Cencrastus, Winter 1990/91), looks at her life and work, suggesting that a study of her reading public might be of interest.

Moira Burgess

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