With My Own Hand
On sale
16th July 2026
Price: £24.99
‘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.
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.
Reviews
Absolutely mesmerising, Douglas's meticulously detailed research reveals a fascinating story that's been lost for centuries
Though a work of non-fiction, this is a teasing and tantalising historical drama, beautifully written by Douglas
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
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
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
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