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With my own hand: the secret life of Marie Maitland, Scotland's sixteenth-century Sappho
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The youngest of the Maitland siblings, Marie had watched her elder sisters be married off one by one, destined to take up the unavoidable path for women in sixteenth-century Scotland. However, as she neared marrying age, her father, an influential judge, poet and Keeper of the Privy Seal under Mary, Queen of Scots, went blind and suddenly needed someone to act as his scribe and secretary. In taking up this role, Marie indeed avoided the unavoidable, dedicating her life to her father's work. After his death, she put the finishing touches on the Maitland Quarto, long recognised as significant for its preservation of the poetry of the male great-and-good of sixteenth-century Scotland. A rare feat for a woman at the time, but Marie's story doesn't stop there. For hidden in the pages of the Maitland Quarto, historian and translator Ashley Douglas discovered Marie's own secret lesbian love poetry.
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