Marie Maitland’s Hidden Love Poems Cast Her as Scotland’s Anne Lister

Marie Maitland signed her name twice on the opening leaf of a Scottish manuscript in 1586, then folded a lesbian love poem into its pages without ever putting her name to it directly. A book out this Thursday argues that omission was deliberate, and that Maitland deserves recognition as a queer foremother centuries before Anne Lister earned the title of Britain’s first modern lesbian.

Historian Ashley Douglas makes the case in With My Own Hand: The Secret Life of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s Sixteenth Century Sappho. The book leans hardest on Poem 49 of the Maitland Quarto, a nine stanza declaration of one woman’s devotion to another, then builds outward into a full biography of the woman most scholars believe wrote it.

A Manuscript Signed Twice, Then Left Anonymous

The Maitland Quarto is a collection of Scots poetry compiled around 1586 by members of the Maitland family of Lethington, in East Lothian, and their circle. It now sits in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, after a later Maitland descendant gave it to Samuel Pepys as a gift in the seventeenth century.

Marie’s name appears twice on the manuscript’s first leaf, once in italic script and once in secretary hand, alongside the date 1586. Scholars have long read a partial anagram in the opening sonnet, the phrase maid ane immortall, as a further signature, repeated beneath the poem for emphasis.

The book, published by draws on newly unearthed primary historical records to trace Marie’s life well beyond the manuscript itself. It arrived on shelves the same year the Quarto’s authorship debate, running since 1786, finally gets a book length answer.

The manuscript itself holds ninety five Older Scots poems, compiled in what appears to be the final year of Sir Richard Maitland’s life. He and his wife both died in 1586, and the Quarto reads in part like a memorial volume for a father whose sight had failed him years earlier.

Poem 49 Speaks in a Woman’s Voice

Poem 49 runs to nine stanzas and seventy two lines, written explicitly in a woman’s voice. It borrows the language of idealised male friendship and heterosexual marriage, then turns both traditions toward one woman’s desire for another.

At its climax, the poet imagines disguising herself as a man so the two might marry, before reluctantly accepting that such a union could never be formalised. She vows everlasting devotion instead.

Ye weild me holie at your will and raviss my affectioun

Those lines close the poem’s second stanza, spoken by its narrator to the woman she loves. The poem ends by insisting there is more constancy in our sex than ever among men has been, a direct claim of loyalty between women over the loyalty of men.

Was Marie Maitland Really Scotland’s Sappho?

Douglas’s book says yes, and rests much of its case on Poem 85. That anonymous verse names Maistres Marie outright, compares her to sapho saige, and predicts she will be remembered as a perfect poet once the book is finished being compiled.

John Pinkerton, the antiquarian who first published selections from the Quarto in 1786, was the earliest to suggest Marie was its scribe. He was far less generous about Poem 49 itself, dismissing it in print as a song of friendship from one lady to another of sufficient insipidity. William Craigie challenged Pinkerton’s scribal theory in his own 1920 edition, arguing an expert penman more likely copied the manuscript for her.

Modern scholarship has moved past both objections. A 2015 critical edition from the Scottish Text Society called Poem 49 a lyric in celebration of the constancy of erotic love between women, while still hedging on firm authorship.

Poem 85’s comparison to the ancient Greek poet is the detail Douglas treats as decisive. She goes further than any previous scholar by arguing the Quarto contains not one sapphic poem but three, meant to be read as a single story.

• Poem 49: nine stanzas in a woman’s voice, declaring devotion that outstrips anything ever shown between men, and imagining a marriage disguised as a man.
• Poem 72: which Douglas attributes to the still unidentified married woman she believes Maitland loved.
• Poem 89: a further poem Douglas credits to Maitland herself, closing out what she reads as the relationship’s unhappy ending.

Read together, Douglas argues, the three poems trace a love affair from its beginning to its collapse, written by two women hiding in plain sight inside a manuscript otherwise dominated by men.

Two Women, Two Centuries Apart

Douglas’s central claim is that Maitland should be recognised as a new Anne Lister, the Yorkshire landowner lauded as the first modern lesbian for the life she recorded in her own diaries. The comparison invites an obvious side by side.

Lister’s diaries run to roughly 7,720 pages, about one sixth of them in a cipher she called crypt hand. She used it to record sexual relationships with multiple women, drawing on the epigrams of the Roman poet Martial for vocabulary the English language did not yet offer her.

Maitland left nothing like that. She wrote about love and longing but never about sex itself, a gap Douglas has to argue around rather than across.

Where Historians Draw the Line

Not everyone reading Douglas’s evidence reaches the same conclusion about how to label it. One literary historian, writing in The Conversation, suggested Maitland’s verses sit closer to the amorous but platonic friendship poetry that Katherine Philips and her circle produced roughly a century later in England.

• Ashley Douglas, the book’s author: rejects the friendship label outright, arguing it renders historical lesbianism invisible by default.
• A literary historian writing in The Conversation: reads the same verses as closer to intensely amorous, platonic friendship poetry from a century later.

The disagreement matters because the historical bar for proving women had sex with each other has always sat higher than the bar for men. Court records and confessions supply plenty of evidence for prosecuted male relationships. Women rarely appear in those same records at all.

Scotland’s own legal history explains some of that silence. Sodomy carried the death penalty in Scots law until 1889, and same sex relations between men were not fully decriminalised until 1981. Women who loved women mostly evaded the courts altogether, which meant they also evaded the paper trail that keeps other lives visible centuries later.

Even well documented cases resist easy labels. The British Museum remains equivocal about the Ladies of Llangollen, two women who eloped together, shared a home, and shared a bed for decades. Without Lister’s diaries to compare them against, historians would likely read that arrangement as friendship too.

A Fortune Undone by Her Brother

Douglas’s archival digging fixes Maitland’s birth in the late 1540s, decades earlier than some previous estimates. She grew up one of several Maitland daughters in a family that produced two of the era’s most powerful Scottish officials.

Her father, Sir Richard Maitland, served as a judge, poet and Keeper of the Privy Seal under Mary, Queen of Scots. When his sight failed, Marie became his scribe and secretary, a role that appears to have bought her years of financial independence most unmarried women of her class never had.

She held income rights as the tackswoman of the teind sheaves of Bolton parish, leasing harvest income from local farms in her own name years before her marriage. Douglas argues her father worked to protect that independence permanently, likely as reward for her years transcribing his failing eyesight’s worth of writing.

The plan collapsed after his death in 1586. Her brother John, who went on to become Lord Chancellor of Scotland, took over as head of the family and married her off quickly to Alexander Lauder of Haltoun, a much younger man, for reasons of political and financial convenience.

Maitland died roughly ten years later, in 1596, possibly in childbirth. Scottish custom meant she would never have taken her husband’s surname, so the records that survive her still call her Marie Maitland, not Marie Lauder.

From Cambridge Archive to Scottish Classroom

Douglas’s original argument for Maitland’s authorship first appeared in a 2021 blog for the National Library of Scotland, written for LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) history month. Five years on, that single blog post has become a book from a major publisher, blurbed by novelists including Philippa Gregory and Tracy Borman.

Gregory, the historical novelist, called it a real extension of our knowledge of women of the period, engagingly told. Rebecca Mason, a historian specialising in early modern Scottish women’s legal history, said the research should help restore Maitland among the figures who shaped the period.

An imagined portrait of Maitland, commissioned by Douglas in 2021, now hangs alongside a reproduction of Poem 49 as part of a display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Douglas has also worked with the charity Time for Inclusive Education to build secondary school lesson plans built around Poem 49, part of Scotland’s push to build LGBT+ topics into its national curriculum.

Douglas herself has kept building on the discovery since. She has written on Scotland’s Scots language children’s books, consulted on Rona Munro’s James Plays stage series, and contributed an essay on queer history to a 2025 anthology from Historic Environment Scotland.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who Was Marie Maitland?

Marie Maitland was a Scottish gentlewoman born in the late 1540s, daughter of the courtier Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington. She worked as her father’s scribe after he went blind, later married Alexander Lauder of Haltoun in 1586, and became known as Lady Haltoun rather than taking his surname, following the custom of the time.

What Is the Maitland Quarto?

The Maitland Quarto is a manuscript of ninety five Older Scots poems compiled around 1586 by the Maitland family of Lethington and their circle. A later family member gave it to the diarist Samuel Pepys, and it has sat in Cambridge’s Pepys Library at Magdalene College ever since.

When Is With My Own Hand Published?

Headline Press, an imprint of Hachette, publishes With My Own Hand: The Secret Life of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s Sixteenth Century Sappho on July 16. The hardback runs to 320 pages and follows years of archival research by author Ashley Douglas.

Did Anne Lister and Marie Maitland Ever Overlap?

No. Maitland’s poetry was written around 1586, while Anne Lister was not born until 1791, more than two centuries later. Douglas’s comparison between the two women is thematic, resting on parallels in independence and self-determination rather than any shared time or place.

Has Maitland’s Poetry Been Adapted Beyond the Book?

Yes. Folk musician Josie Duncan wrote a new song cycle inspired by Maitland’s life, called A’ Chiad Litir, commissioned for Edinburgh Tradfest with Douglas contributing spoken word alongside the band.