Henrietta Keddie

Henrietta Keddie (1827–1914) was a prolific Scottish novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Sarah Tytler. Her domestic realism became popular with women, as did her conduct books for girls.

Henrietta Keddie was born at Cupar, Fife, on 4 March 1827 to Philip Keddie (1793/4–1852), a lawyer, and his wife, Mary, née Gibb (d. 1869), and spent her childhood summers at Grange Farm, outside Elie and Earlsferry, where her father owned a coalmine. She was educated by an older sister, Margaret, and then attended school in Leith for a time.

The family broke up in the 1840s, although the "Grange collieries" continued to operate to some extent up to the early 1860s. In 1848, Henrietta and three of her sisters set up a school in Cupar. In 1869, after the death of her parents and most of her siblings, she and Margaret moved to Blackheath, London, and then to Kensington. Left alone after Margaret's death in 1880, Henrietta went on a continental tour with friends and an adopted daughter in 1884, and then moved to Oxford for twenty years and Bristol for two, before returning to London, where she died in Belsize Park Gardens on 6 January 1914.

Keddie began writing in the 1850s. Her first two novels failed to sell, however. Her first paid story was "Meg of Elibank", based on a local Selkirk tradition, which appeared in Fraser's Magazine in 1856. Some of her earliest publications appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, others in Cornhill Magazine, Good Words and the Sunday Magazine. These efforts introduced her to some writers and intellectuals, such as Dr John Brown, Isabella Bird and Margaret Oliphant. Her circle grew in London to include the historian J. A. Froude, Dinah Craik, Mrs Henry Wood, Jean Ingelow and others.

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