Isabella Fyvie Mayo

Isabella Fyvie Mayo (pen name, Edward Garrett; 10 December 1843 – 13 May 1914) With the help of friends, Fyvie Mayo published poems and stories, using the pseudonym, Edward Garrett. Fyvie Mayo spent most of her life living in Aberdeen, where she was the first woman elected to a public board. Fyvie Mayo was described as an "ethical anarchist, pacifist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist campaigner";

Early years and education Isabella Fyvie was born on 10 December 1843 in London of Scottish parents George Fyvie and Margaret Thomson. As a child, her father told her the legends of Buchan, along with stories of his father's farm which the family had occupied for three hundred years. Her father's people were staunch Scottish Episcopalians, one of them being the Dean of Moray and Ross. Fyvie Mayo's husband was in delicate health, and this led to a Canadian tour, followed by residence in Surrey, of which there are glimpses in some of her stories. Fyvie Mayo favoured women's suffrage and spoke out for women's right to vote, and her writings both reflected and criticised the changes in the movement, often regarding the middle class activists making choices that poorer women could not afford to make.

Fyvie Mayo had a range of exchanges, as convenor of the local WSPU events, with Emmeline Pankhurst and Helen Fraser, and in the local press with someone calling themselves 'Anti-Suffragette'. and Fyvie Mayo was nominated for a blue memorial plaque in Aberdeen. of cancer and left her estate to Ferdinands.

Style and themes Fyvie Mayo's (as Edward Garrett) popular tales and sketches were charming and natural in detail, and showed that her sympathies were wide, while her narratives were drawn with power and accuracy. Her ballads were remarkable for their simplicity and those lightly marked rhymes peculiar to that style of verse. She also took easily to the measures of the sonnet, and her utterances possessed directness of thought, as well as depth of imagination and artistic finish.

Selected works

Occupations of a Retired Life (1868) The Crust of the Cake (1869) Seen and Heard (1871) Premiums paid to Experience (1872) Crooked Places (1873) By Still Waters (1874) Doing and Dreaming (1876) Not by Bread Alone (1890) Her Day of Service (1892) A Black Diamond (1893) Rab Bethuene's Double (1894) A Daughter of the Klephts (1897) A Nine Days Wonder (1898) Other People's Stairs (1898) Crystal Joyce (1899) Recollections of Fifty Years, autobiography (1910)