Storytelling among Lowland Scots since 1800: An All-Female, Upper-Middle-Class Family Oral Tradition in the Context of Written Tale Collections

Abstract

In 1821, while on a summer visit to Rossie in Fife, seven-year-old Cecilia Margaret Douglas wrote home to her mother in Edinburgh describing a recent 'play day'. She named among the players a special nurse: 'Jeany Durie was also of the party[;] she is quite well and quite as pleasant as she was last year.' 1 This, with a few other lines from a later letter from Cecilia to her mother, provide the only written testimony yet found for the genesis of a family storytelling tradition spanning at least 150 years. Jeanie 2 was a riveting storyteller and a special figure for Cecilia, who listened well in her girlhood and then retold the nurse's tales long into life, sharing them with a young niece, Jemima Bannerman. Jemima, as impressed by 'Aunt Ceil's' tellings as Ceil had been by Nurse Durie's, fixed them in memory and finally wrote them down as an adult. Jemima then read the tales to her own niece, Kathleen Mary Turing Bannerman. In 1968, when Kathleen Bannerman, then in her seventies 3 , presented a typescript collection of five tales to the School of Scottish Studies, she was passing on a female storytelling tradition shared over four generations. Because the name of Jeanie Durie appears nowhere in the typescript, it is a tribute to the bonds formed between Jeanie and Ceil, Ceil and Jemima, and Jemima and Kathleen-and to the power of their collective love of story-that we know it today. The 'Bannerman Manuscript', as this tale cache has come to be known, appears a modest vessel for broad speculation, yet its twenty-one typed pages are unique in ways that bear close attention. Slight as these tales are, they witness a long, unbroken tradition of female