Annie S. Swan

Annie Shepherd Swan, CBE (8 July 1859 – 17 June 1943) was a Scottish journalist and fiction writer. She wrote mainly under 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. She has been called "one of the most commercially successful popular novelists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". 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.

Early life Swan was born on 8 July 1859 in Mountskip, Gorebridge, Scotland. 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.

Writings 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.

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".

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." 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).

(L to R) Helen Crawfurd, Janet Barrowman, Margaret McPhun, Mrs A. A. Wilson, Frances McPhun, Nancy A. John and Annie Swan. Swan used her maiden name for most of her career, 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.

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.

From 1924 Swan ran another penny weekly, The Annie Swan Annual. She also wrote several popular novels at this time including The Last of the Laidlaws (1920), Closed Doors (1926) and The Pendulum (1926). They moved two years later to Morningside, Edinburgh, where Burnett Smith became a medical student, and in 1893 to London, where their two children, Effie (1893–1973) and Eddie (born 1896), were born. The family moved to Hertford in 1908, where her son Eddie died in a shooting accident in September 1910. Two successful plays, Getting Together by John Hay Beith and The Better 'Ole by Bruce Bairnsfather, were written for the occasion. While in the United States, she also wrote a book on the cultural differences between women in Britain and the United States entitled: As Others See Her: An Englishwoman's Impressions of the American Woman in War Time (1919).

Swan was an active Liberal throughout her life and became a well-known suffragist. Shortly after the Representation of the People Act 1918 gave women the vote in Britain, she was the first female candidate, standing unsuccessfully for the Maryhill division of Glasgow in the general election of 1922. Of 32 female candidates across Britain in that general election, only two were returned.

After her defeat, the Women's Freedom League claimed that Swan and other female candidates would have been elected under a system of proportional representation like those in Ireland, Netherlands and Germany. She was also a founding member and one-time vice president of the Scottish National Party.

Later life Swan's husband died in 1927 and she and her daughter moved to Gullane, East Lothian. She was made a CBE in the 1930 Birthday Honours for literary and public services. She died at her home in Gullane on 17 June 1943, aged 83.