Marjory Fleming by Oriel Malet was first published in 1946 by Faber and Faber, but it has more recently been reprinted by Persephone Books, it’s their number 17.

Marjory was born in 1803 in Kirkcaldy and buried there too at the age of just eight. We lived in Kirkcaldy for 26 years and her grave is in Abbotshall Church, near where we lived. After her death she was regarded as a bit of a child prodigy because she left behind her quite a lot of her writing which is now housed in the National Library of Scotland. Robert Louis. Stevenson wrote  “Marjory Fleming was possibly – no, I take back possibly – she was one of the noblest works of God.”

Oriel Malet has written a fictional account of Marjory’s short life. The family lived above a bookshop in the High Street, but from the age of 6 she was taken to live with her much wealthier cousins in Edinburgh. Cousin Isabella was keen to take on Marjory as a bit of a project and strangely Marjory’s parents were happy to giver her up to that branch of the family – for three years!

No doubt Marjory was very happy to be in a much wealthier and more sociable household, it’s thought that she may have met the young Walter Scott there as he was a friend of the family. I can’t help thinking that as she seemed to be the life and soul of her own family (maybe too much for her mother to handle) it must have been a wrench for her father whom she seems to have most resembled in personality.

Anyway, we don’t even know for sure what it was that killed Marjory but it was probably some form of meningitis. The memorial to her in Abbotshall Church was only erected in 1930. I did read Pet Marjory by Dr John Brown some years ago which had more of her actual writing in it as I recall.

Sadly my copy doesn’t have the dust jacket.