Women of the Highlands by Katharine Stewart sampler

Foreword
women of the highlands have always told their stories; their
stories, legends, songs and charms have been handed down, in
Gaelic, and later in English, through generations of Highland
women, until the individual and specific merges into the shadow
of the undocumented ‘long-ago’. Katharine Stewart’s latest book
has the authority of being part of the living tradition it describes:
a book about Highland women by a Highland woman, who is
herself part of the seamless tradition. Like Elizabeth Grant of
Rothiemurchus, Katharine Stewart writes about her own beloved
country. Her anecdotes of individual women have an air of intimacy
and understanding about her subjects that comes from belonging
to the same world. She writes as if she knows them. At the same
time, Elizabeth Grant in the nineteenth century, and Katharine
Stewart in the twenty-first, bring to their subject the knowledge of
a wider world, and the intellectual discipline acquired in a post-
Enlightenment, literate, English-speaking Scotland. Women of the
Highlands is the result of much research, and often the reader has
a sense of a shadowy half-known tale brought into the light of day,
and carefully examined from all angles. How many readers will
know, for example, the full story of Flora MacDonald, whose
reluctant aid to a fleeing prince was just one brief incident in a life
shaped by the changes that were to alter the eighteenth century
Highland world beyond recognition: rebellion, clearances, agricultural
improvement, emigration and colonial wars? Throughout
the book respect for legend goes hand in hand with a meticulous
regard for fact, and the reader is made to see that both kinds of
truth are necessary to do full justice to the story of the women of
the Highlands.
In some respects women’s lives differ greatly from one another
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