Jeanne Williams

Those of you who enjoyed THE ISLAND HARP and DAUGHTER OF THE STORM will be pleased to know I have finished HEARTHSTONE (unpublished as yet) and am well into the fourth and last book of this quartet.
When I went to the Hebrides or Western Isles of Scotland over ten years ago, I intended to write a multi-generational story like THE CAVE DREAMERS
(Basques), SO MANY KINGDOMS (Brazil), or THE HEAVEN SWORD (Scandinavia). At fascinating Skara Brae with its stone furniture still in place and at ruined
brochs and standing stones, I searched for Brid, the ancient Celtic fire goddess who evolved into St. Brigid. I thought she would be a mortal woman who learned to tame fire. I did find many signs of her, but what seized me was the terrible story of why some islands were abandoned and why there were so many crumbling stone houses.
That was the first time I heard of The Highland Clearances where thousands of crofters were forced from lands their ancestors had used time out of mind, often by their own clan chieftains, to make room for sheep or deer parks. I resolved to make this story known in the United States.
It begins when Mairi MacLeod is only sixteen and her home is burned by the laird's agents. Her grandfather goes inside to rescue the fabled harp, Cridhe, and dies of his burns. It is up tp Mairi to find shelter, hope-and songs-for her people. James Matheson, the new laird, is impressed by Mairi's resolve and lends her money, on the security of the harp, to help the dispossessed build a fishing boat and set up a weaving business. You will see I was possessed by the story, Mairi, the Long Island, and her clanna. Often I write of immigrants coming to the United States and making lives here, but after seeing the Islands, I wanted to show a family that hung on between the rocks and the sea, eating the starvation food (actually quite healthy!) of shellfish and seaweed.
DAUGHTER OF THE STORM is told through Christy, a waif orphaned by the infamous evictions at Sollas, who becomes Mairi's foster daughter though Mairi cannot love her. Mairi's baby was born prematurely and died when Mairi, against her husband's wish, went to try to stop the Sollas clearances. Married despite Iain MacDonald's being gentry, the couple never recovers from this tragedy. Christy, from childhood, adores her foster-brother, David, who is crippled in a fall from a cliff.
At his father's insistence he goes to be educated at Inverness while Christy becomes a teacher. Because of her care for the crofters at Ness, she is given a famous harp of the Morisons, hereditary judges of the Isles in olden times.
The end of the story is true. A young Inverness lawyer did in effect bring Matheson's agent to trial when this cruel man, Donald Munro, evicted crofters from the Isle of Bernara. They refused to go and marched on
Stornoway. Their trial instead convicted Munro who lost his office and his many powers. It was the first time crofters had ever won a legal victory though it was not till 1886 that they would win security of tenure so long as rents were paid.
This did not, however, allocate new land or take any away from deer parks and sheep farms. Many crofters and cottars (who owned no land at all) emigrated to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U. S.
In HEARTHSTONE, Kirsty Ericson, Mairi's daughter by Magnus, the Orkney sea captain who loved her so long and finally wed her after Iain was killed by a jealous woman, leaved the Long Isle so that her faithless sweetheart will marry her silly young cousin whom he has seduced. Kirsty carries his child but tells no one. She loses the baby on the voyage to Canada and Captain Keir MacRae helps her bury the tiny boy on a rocky islet near Newfoundland.
After working in a boarding house run by Meg Gowan, born on the Selkirkers' overland tramp from Churchill to York Factory in 1813. Meg longs to return to Red River and Kirsty goes with her, but Winnipeg has become a city, and they go northwest by ox cart with Louis Falcon, a giant Metis, a cousin of Meg's long dead lover. Buying cheap land, they establish a farm in company with Jorun Olafson, an Icelander with a tiny motherless daughter. It's a hard but peaceful life till Keir sets up a horse ranch with English friends and his wife falls in love with Louie's beautiful, angry son who plans to kill the settlers on this remote frontier and restore it to his people.
I'm working on the fourth book now wherein Kirsty's son, Johnny, grows up and with his musician friends volunteers to serve in World War I. They are presently in the front line in the winter before the April storming of Vimy Ridge where the Canadians won a name for valor. Johnny will meet an Island cousin who is killed saving him, and then Johnny probably will, for his friend's sake, try to get a croft for his widow on the island during the time Lord Leverhulme, the owner of Lewis, was trying to create what he considered a better way of life for the crofters.
Johnny has inherited the family gift of music and he will meet his grandmother, Mairi, old but indomitable, and find the harp seems to favor him. Beyond that I don't know how the story will go. I'll have to find out by the writing of it!






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