Mrs Alec Tweedie

Ethel Brilliana Tweedie
Mrs Alec Tweedie (1862-1940) (Herbert Gustave Schmalz), 1894)
Born	Ethel Brilliana Harley 1862 London, England
Died	15 April 1940 London, England
Nationality	United Kingdom
Occupation	author
Known for	travel books

Ethel Brilliana Tweedie F.R.G.S. (1862–1940) was a prolific English author, travel writer, biographer, historian, editor, journalist, photographer and illustrator. She wrote as Mrs. Alec Tweedie, Mrs. Alec-Tweedie and as Ethel B. Harley.

Ethel Tweedie was born 1 January 1862 in London, the daughter of George Way Harley F.R.S. and Emma Jessier (Musprat) Harley, into an early life of wealth and privilege. Her siblings included a sister (Olga) and three brothers (Vaughan B., Vernon De V. and Harold S.), She was named by her father for a famous relative, Lady Brilliana Harley (wife of Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan). She was educated at Queen's College, London, and abroad in Germany.

In 1886 she visited Iceland on holiday with her brother Vaughan B. Harley, her future husband Alexander (Alec) Leslie Tweedie, a woman friend, and two other men. At the suggestion of her father, she kept a journal of her travels and published it afterwards as her first book, A Girl's Ride in Iceland' in 1895 (even including an appendix on Icelandic geysers by her father). She married Alexander Tweedie two years later on 1 January 1887.

In 1893, following a telegram warning of the sudden serious illness of her brother Vaughan in Christiania, Norway she and her sister traveled to see him. She returned to Norway again within two years, then later published her second book A Winter Jaunt to Norway: with Accounts of Nansen, Ibsen, Bjornson, Brandes, and Many Others outlining her travel experiences and meetings with a number of famous people while abroad. Then, tragically, her whole life changed in the early summer of 1896 with the sudden death of her husband. She never remarried.

In 1897, still upset and stunned by his death, she agreed to accompany her sister and a Finnish companion, Frau von Lilly, on a trip abroad to Finland. During that time she gathered material that eventually made its way into a third book, Through Finland in Carts , published later in 1898 and beginning her career as a popular writer.

Tweedie's extensive bibliography spans the years from 1889 to 1936. Though she may be best known as a travel writer today, her works also include a biography of her father (George Harley, F.R.S. The Life of a London Physician), some works that are essentially a layperson's studies in early 20th century ethnography :Cremation the World Around and America As I Saw It; or, America Revisited,. A great number of her short works were written and published in the London popular press. After 1912 her works became more autobiographical.