| Annie S. Swan CBE | |
| Birth Name: | Annie Shepherd Swan |
| Pseudonym: | Annie S. Swan, Annie S. Smith, David Lyall, Mrs Burnett-Smith |
| Birth Date: | 1859 7, df=y |
| Birth Place: | Mountskip, Gorebridge, Scotland |
| Death Place: | Gullane, East Lothian, Scotland |
| Occupation: | Writer, novelist, journalist |
| Genre: | Fiction, dramatic fiction, romantic fiction, non-fiction, advice, feminism, politics, religion, social commentary |
| Notableworks: | Aldersyde (1884) |
| Spouse: | James Burnett Smith (1883–1927) |
Annie Shepherd Swan, CBE (8 July 1859 – 17 June 1943) was a Scottish journalist and fiction writer. She wrote mainly in her maiden name, but also as David Lyall and later Mrs Burnett Smith. A writer of romantic fiction for women, she had over 200 novels, serials, stories and other fiction published between 1878 and her death.[1] [2] [3] [4] She has been called "one of the most commercially successful popular novelists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries".[5] Swan was politically active in the First World War, and as a suffragist, a Liberal activist and founder-member and vice-president of the Scottish National Party.
Swan was born on 8 July 1859 in Mountskip, Gorebridge, Scotland.[6] She was one of the seven children of Edward Swan (died 1893), a farmer and merchant, by his first wife, Euphemia Brown (died 1881). After her father's business failed, she attended school in Edinburgh, latterly at Queen Street Ladies College. Her father belonged to an Evangelical Union congregation, but she turned in adulthood to the Church of Scotland. She persistently wrote fiction as a teenager.[7]
Her first publication was Wrongs Righted (1881), as a serial in The People's Friend. This periodical she long saw as the mainstay of her career, although she contributed to many others.[8]
The novel that made her reputation was Aldersyde (1883), a romance set in the Scottish Borders that was favourably reviewed. Swan received an autographed letter of appreciation from Lord Tennyson. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone wrote to The Scotsman that he thought it "beautiful as a work of art" for its "truly living sketches of Scottish character".[9]
Later successes such as The Gates of Eden (1887) and Maitland of Lauriston (1891) owed a debt to the fiction of Margaret Oliphant, who was among her critics, accusing Swan's novels of presenting a stereotypical, unrealistic depiction of Scotland. In a review of Carlowrie (1884), Oliphant went so far as to say Swan "presented an entirely distorted view of Scottish life."[8] Because of her dominance over Women at Home, editor-in-chief W. R. Nicoll often called it Annie Swan's Magazine. She became editor of the magazine from 1893 to 1917.[3] While writing for the British Weekly, she became acquainted with S. R. Crockett and J. M. Barrie, whose work like hers was given the unflattering epithet kailyard, an allusion to its parochialism and sentimentality.[7]
By 1898, Swan had published over 30 books,[2] mainly novels, many published serially. She also wrote poetry, stories and books on advice, politics and religion. In 1901, The Juridical Review reported that Swan's books were the most favoured by female inmates in Irish prisons.[10] In 1906, she was profiled in Helen Black's Notable Women Authors of the Day. She is named as the favourite novelist of William Morel's sweetheart Lily in D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913).[11]
Swan used her maiden name for most of her career,[2] [8] but occasionally the pseudonyms David Lyall and later Mrs Burnett Smith. She was a respected public speaker involved in social and political causes such as the Temperance movement. She wrote books and novels on the suffragist movement in Britain, often as David Lyall, such as Margaret Holroyd: or, the Pioneers (1910).[12] [13] The novel used interconnecting stories that followed a young suffragette, Margaret Holroyd, and dealt with many real problems faced by suffragettes and suffragists, such as disapproval of family and friends, fear of public speaking, physical exhaustion and ethical dilemmas in a rebellious, sometimes militant atmosphere.[14]
She was involved in the Women's Suffrage movement herself, and was arrested during a window smashing raid in London, alongside a number of other Scottish women. [15]