With My Own Hand
The secret life of Marie Maitland, Scotland's sixteenth-century Sappho
Will be published approx. on 16. July 2026
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-1-0354-3060-4 (ISBN)
Description
'A really thrilling discovery . . . This is a real extension of our knowledge of women of the period, engagingly told' - Philippa Gregory
'It held me captive from the first page to the last. Utterly breathtaking' - Tracy Borman
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. Penning such poetry in the hostile climate of post-Reformation Scotland, with its suffocating tightening of moral control over society, was an incredible act of bravery. Unable to sign it directly, Marie, insistent on her voice and love being known, littered the manuscript with clues to its true penmanship. Clues that, until now, have remained unseen.
Building on her initial discovery of Marie's poetry, in With My Own Hand Ashley Douglas draws on a vast range of newly unearthed primary historical records to tell the fascinating story of Marie and her manuscript, in full, for the very first time.
'With My Own Hand is a beautiful tribute to a woman lost to time, a work of history as courageous as its subject . . . Douglas has given us a gift in these pages. We need more historians like her' - Leah Redmond Chang
'It held me captive from the first page to the last. Utterly breathtaking' - Tracy Borman
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. Penning such poetry in the hostile climate of post-Reformation Scotland, with its suffocating tightening of moral control over society, was an incredible act of bravery. Unable to sign it directly, Marie, insistent on her voice and love being known, littered the manuscript with clues to its true penmanship. Clues that, until now, have remained unseen.
Building on her initial discovery of Marie's poetry, in With My Own Hand Ashley Douglas draws on a vast range of newly unearthed primary historical records to tell the fascinating story of Marie and her manuscript, in full, for the very first time.
'With My Own Hand is a beautiful tribute to a woman lost to time, a work of history as courageous as its subject . . . Douglas has given us a gift in these pages. We need more historians like her' - Leah Redmond Chang
Reviews / Votes
Absolutely mesmerising, Douglas's meticulously detailed research reveals a fascinating story that's been lost for centuries -- Sara Sheridan Though a work of non-fiction, this is a teasing and tantalising historical drama, beautifully written by Douglas -- Sass MacDonald With My Own Hand is a necessary act of queer historical reclamation. In recovering Marie Maitland from the margins of manuscript culture, Ashley Douglas does more than reconstruct a life: she demonstrates that women's same-sex desire was part of the lived and articulated reality of the early modern world. At a time when the legitimacy of queer lives is again contested in public discourse, this return to a sixteenth-century woman who loved women feels not antiquarian but urgent. The power of the book lies in its archival seriousness, in its patient reading of documents, contexts and silences, and in its refusal to allow women's desire to be footnoted or euphemised out of history. This is not simply biography; it is the restoration of a lineage. Douglas reminds us that queer history survives not by accident, but because someone chooses to look for it. An important and timely contribution to the history of women who loved women -- Christopher Stephens, author of The Light of Day Set against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent periods in Scottish history, this is the story of forbidden but enduring love, of the strength of the female spirit in a world dominated by men, and above all of an extraordinary woman far ahead of her time. It held me captive from the first page to the last. Utterly breathtaking -- Tracy Borman Engaging, evocative, enthralling: Ashley Douglas shines a light on a part of Scotland's history - and a fascinating Scotswoman - too often overlooked or not even written in -- Steven Veerapen, author of The Wisest Fool: The Lavish Life of James VI and I The joy of this book, for me, is its vivid evocation of a secret love story - a love story between women in the sixteenth century. It has all the drama and complexity of the best romances. Ashley Douglas has created a clear and accessible narrative that takes us right into the thoughts and feelings of Marie Maitland, allowing us to see and experience as she did, over a gap of hundreds of years. The academic rigour with which Ashley Douglas has researched her story clearly establishes a truth too often obscured by the ignorance and biases of earlier historians. Women have always loved other women, romantically and sexually. Queer love has been part of human history as long as humans have existed. But centuries of homophobic assumptions mean that truth is still disputed. Ashley Douglas uses original source material, without speculation, to demonstrate a love that cannot, now, be denied or argued out of existence. By the end we feel certain that this is only the tip of an iceberg of untold historical love stories that might be found if others looked with the same energy and meticulous care -- Rona Munro A really thrilling discovery - a sixteenth-century woman writing, and she's a professional clerk, and she's a poet, and she's writing love letters to another woman and she's Scots. This is a real extension of our knowledge of women of the period, engagingly told -- Philippa Gregory Beautifully written and meticulously researched, With My Own Hand immerses the reader in Marie Maitland's sixteenth-century world from the very first page. By reconstructing Marie's exceptional life through in-depth and careful analysis of a range of legal and literary records housed in archives across Scotland and the UK, Douglas challenges dominant narratives that have rendered stories like Marie's invisible and forgotten for centuries. What emerges is an utterly fascinating account of a sixteenth-century woman who loved other women, and who bravely defied the limits placed upon her within the patriarchal world of early modern Scotland for much of her adult life. Thanks to Douglas' passion and ingenuity, Marie Maitland will no doubt be restored among the great historical figures who shaped early modern Scottish history -- Dr Rebecca Mason, expert in early modern Scottish women's legal history A remarkable exploration of a little-known, sixteenth-century manuscript which reveals the secret life of Marie Maitland who inserted, amongst the poems of her father, her own verses as erotic and sensual declarations of her illicit gay love. Using the manuscript as her map, Ashley Douglas leads us through the social and political upheavals of a Reformation Scotland to tell the story of a defiant and independent woman who insisted on having a voice -- Clare Hunter, author of Threads of Life and Embroidering Her Truth With My Own Hand is a beautiful tribute to a woman lost to time, a work of history as courageous as its subject. With poetic prose and extraordinary attention to detail, Ashley Douglas patiently chisels Marie Maitland from the archive, shaping the tantalizing portrait of a woman whose intelligence and desire were in evidence all along - if only scholars had been willing to look. Douglas has given us a gift in these pages. We need more historians like her * Leah Redmond Chang, author of Young Queens *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Headline Publishing Group
Product notice
Trade binding
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-0354-3060-4 (9781035430604)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Ashley Douglas
With My Own Hand
The secret life of Marie Maitland, Scotland's sixteenth-century Sappho
E-Book
approx. 07/2026
Headline Press
€14.99
Not yet available
Person
Ashley Douglas is a Scottish historian and translator. She has two master's degrees, including an MLitt in Scottish History from the University of St Andrews. Since graduating in 2016, Ashley has developed a national profile and successful career as a translator, historian, and consultant, specialising in LGBT history and the Scots language. She has worked with a range of national heritage, literary and educational organisations, including the National Library of Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland, Time for Inclusive Education, and Scottish National Galleries. She has also been engaged as historical consultant for two of the plays in Rona Munro's acclaimed The James Plays series.