Mildred Robertson Nicoll, 1898-1995

Annie S. Swan Annie Shepherd Swan, daughter of Edward Swan, farmer and potato merchant, was born in Mountskip, near Edinburgh in 1859. She married James Burnett Smith in 1883, and in the early years of their marriage her writing supported him through medical school. She had begun contributing to local papers and writing children's books prior to this time, but received her first commercial success with the publication of Aldersyde in 1883. Set in a small community in the Scottish Borders, this laid the foundations for her subsequent success as a writer of light romantic fiction; by the end of her career she had published over 197 titles. She received her widest audience through serialisation of her novels in The People's Friend but was also a regular contributor to other magazines and periodicals. Departures from her normal style were achieved under the pseudonym, David Lyall, and her married name, Mrs Burnett Smith. Under the former, she wrote stories for the British Weekly, some of which, dealing with the Boer War, were thought at the time to have been written by a male war correspondent. Under her married name came The Pendulum (1926), a novel which dealt with the problems of post-World War One society, and introduced her readers (unwillingly) to the issues of infidelity and divorce, hitherto unseen in her writing. She lived in England for a number of years, but returned to Scotland after her husband's death in 1927, and died at Gullane on 17 Jun 1943. She was awarded a CBE in 1930

For further details see Who Was Who, 1941 - 1950 ; Annie S. Swan, My Life: an Autobiography (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1934), and The Letters of Annie S. Swan, ed. by Mildred Robertson Nicoll (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1945).

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