Marie Maitland, a Sixteenth-century Scottish gentlewoman, has for hundreds of years been recognised because the most probably scribe of the Maitland 4to. This essential manuscript, now held within the Pepys Library of Magdalene Faculty, Cambridge, is an anthology of Scottish poetry by means of contributors of the noble Maitland circle of relatives and their pals.
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Maitland’s title seems two times at the first leaf and could also be present in a partial anagram within the opening sonnet (“maid ane immortall”). By the use of emphasis the anagram is repeated underneath the poem.
In recent times, researchers have said the chance that Maitland no longer simplest copied and curated the manuscript, however that she additionally composed one of the poems.
This comprises, maximum particularly, Poem 49, a lyrical exploration of 1 lady’s want for and dedication to any other. That is an erotic in addition to an emotional poem. On the finish of the second one stanza, the speaker submits to her lover:
Ye weild me holie at your will /
and raviss my affectioun.
In her new ebook With My Personal Hand: The Secret Lifetime of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s 16th Century Sappho, historian and translator Ashley Douglas puts an research of Poem 49 on the middle of her considerate and frequently speculative reconstruction of this early fashionable lady’s queer existence.
Douglas contends that Maitland integrated throughout the manuscript two additional sapphic poems: Poem 72, which she argues was once written by means of Maitland’s unidentified married lady lover and Poem 89, composed by means of Maitland herself. Douglas means that the 3 poems, learn in combination, inform the tale in their courting and its unsatisfied finishing. Some other verse, which will have been written both for Maitland by means of any other lady or about herself, compares her to Sappho, the well-known lesbian lyrical poet of historical Greece.
Reclaiming lesbian historical past
Digging deep into the archives to search out lengthy lost sight of information, Douglas found out that Maitland was once born within the past due 1540s. She remained single till after the demise of her father, the courtier Sir Richard Maitland, which took place when she was once in her past due thirties.
Up so far, Maitland loved substantial monetary independence. Douglas convincingly argues that her father did all he may to make sure that this is able to be maintained after his demise. This was once most probably a praise for her serving as his scribe after he misplaced his sight. Sadly, the plan didn’t paintings. When her brother John (the long run Lord Chancellor of Scotland) changed into head of the family, for causes of political and monetary expediency, Maitland was once briefly married off to a miles more youthful guy. She died simply ten years later, most likely in childbirth.
In step with Douglas, Maitland will have to be recognised as a “new Anne Lister”. Lauded because the “first modern lesbian”, Lister – a member of the Yorkshire landed gentry – loved an strangely self sustaining existence within the first part of the nineteenth century.
Two pages of the Maitland 4to Manuscript transcribed by means of Marie Maitland.
Pepys Library, Magdelene Faculty, Cambridge
From her intensive diaries, which have been in part written in her “crypt hand” code, we all know Lister had more than one relationships with girls. Certainly, she wrote explicitly about her sexual stories, discovering the terminology to explain them within the epigrams of the traditional Roman poet Martial and different resources. Maitland, alternatively, wrote about love and want, however no longer about intercourse itself.
On this appreciate, I’d recommend, Maitland’s verses await extra intently the past due Seventeenth-century poetry of Katherine Philips and her circle, which depicts intensely amorous friendships between girls in platonic phrases.
Douglas, on the other hand, rejects describing the will for girls expressed in Maitland’s poetry on the subject of friendship at the grounds that such labelling renders historic lesbianism invisible.
It’s for sure the case that the load of evidence turns out a lot upper relating to sexual family members between girls. With out this kind of detailed firsthand accounts discovered uniquely in Lister’s diaries, or the vanishingly uncommon proof from courtroom instances or different respectable information, the default assumption is frequently that girls previously didn’t have intercourse with each and every different.
Tthe burden of evidence turns out a lot upper relating to sexual family members between girls. Le Sommeil (The Sleepers) by means of Gustave Courbet (1866).
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris
This assumption is made even if the ladies are recognized to have shared a house (the British Museum, for instance, is equivocal concerning the nature of the connection between the Girls of Llangollen, who famously eloped and lived in combination or even shared a mattress). However what’s possibly maximum outstanding about Lister’s diaries is they divulge that such a lot of girls in her social circle, whether or not they had been unmarried, married or widowed, had relationships – and intercourse – along with her.
If we didn’t have Lister’s diaries, we merely wouldn’t learn about this facet in their non-public lives. With this context in thoughts, the chance that, two centuries previous, the younger Maitland had a sexual courting with any other lady, turns out completely believable.
Between 2019 and 2022, the tv sequence Gentleman Jack portrayed Lister (performed by means of Suranne Jones) as a extremely smart, charismatic, sexually liberated and gender non-conforming lesbian looking for dedication in past due Georgian England.
Douglas represents Maitland as Lister’s sapphic forebear – an informed, highbrow and self-determining lady who discovered (and, unfortunately, misplaced) her love, and far of her liberty, within the repressively patriarchal and conflict-riven setting of Reformation Scotland. On this appreciate a minimum of, Maitland might be regarded as the brand new Gentleman Jack.
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