current Work in progress
Everything Worth Seeing: Wandering Women in Scotland
This project will acquaint readers with an almost forgotten 18th century writer. An intrepid, daring, bossy, indefatigable woman who wrote a companion and useful guide to the Beauties of Scotland (and briefly the North of England). She travelled as close to solo as a widowed woman in the 18th century could: with her maid and manservant. She writes with authority and directs her instructions to all, men and woman. Her view seems to be that woman are as capable as men when it comes to everything in life.
I have begun to retrace Sarah’s journey, plotting, researching, planning, booking, writing, reading, spending hours in archives across the UK. I have started and will complete all of the journey over the next two year writing a book. It will intertwine a powerful, gutsy voice of the historical writer Sarah Murray, and the version of Scotland, its landscape, people and lore that she witnessed in 1796 and 1800 alongside history, folklore, stories of the intervening years with the journey I will take in the modern landscape.
I have begun to retrace Sarah’s journey, plotting, researching, planning, booking, writing, reading, spending hours in archives across the UK. I have started and will complete all of the journey over the next two year writing a book. It will intertwine a powerful, gutsy voice of the historical writer Sarah Murray, and the version of Scotland, its landscape, people and lore that she witnessed in 1796 and 1800 alongside history, folklore, stories of the intervening years with the journey I will take in the modern landscape.