When people talk about Scotland’s past, they usually start with the men—kings, lairds, warriors, statesmen. The ones whose names survived because they held power on paper.
But the deeper I went into my own research—my lineage, the records, the political histories—the more I saw what the official versions leave out:
Women weren’t standing in the wings.
They were governing, negotiating, defending, deciding— often in ways that shaped events far more than the men who got the credit.
Some ruled as regents.
Some managed estates that functioned like small kingdoms.
Some forged alliances that held clans together.
Some stepped in after the deaths of fathers, husbands, or sons and kept entire lineages from collapsing.
And countless others influenced their families and communities in ways historians didn’t bother to record.
I look for those women on purpose—the ones who were recorded mainly as someone’s wife or daughter, yet changed far more than just their last names.
Those are the women who inform my fiction.
Those are the women who shaped Scotland.
And those are the women I write for—and for their descendants, who carry strengths they may not yet realize they’ve inherited.
Why These Women Became the Center of My Fiction
When I began writing my first novel, I wasn’t trying to make a statement. I was trying to understand what mattered to them, what they fought for, what they endured.
And very quickly, a pattern formed:
Every major turn in a family’s history had a woman standing at the pivot.
Sometimes she was named.
Often she wasn’t.
But the imprint was unmistakable.
A marriage that realigned two feuding houses.
A widow managing lands while a boy-heir came of age.
A mother navigating the politics of court because her child’s future depended on it.
A daughter sent north or south as a bargaining chip—who nonetheless forged alliances of her own.
These weren’t ornamental lives.
They were consequential.
And as I followed the threads—legal, ecclesiastical, and estate records, everything from charters and baptismal entries to inheritance disputes, treason trials, and land transfers—it became clear that the absence of women from the narrative wasn’t evidence of their insignificance.
It was evidence of what the record-keepers valued.
I was interested in what the women valued.
What they fought for.
What they refused.
What they protected when everything else fell apart.
Their stories weren’t passive byproducts of a man’s life; they were engines of survival, continuity, and change.
That is why I write them at the center—not as symbols of rebellion, but as the architects of their own realities, however constrained those realities were.
What Genealogy Taught Me About the Women in My Own Line
When I started tracing my family’s history, I expected dates, places, and names. What I didn’t expect was how quickly the women slipped out of sight the moment I stepped into the 16th century.
A man’s life might be recorded across a dozen documents—land charters, court summonses, military rolls, tax records, fealty oaths.
A woman’s life, even one of status, might be nothing more than:
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a marriage notation
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a line identifying her as “relict of” a deceased husband
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or a brief reference in a baptismal entry—“mother to.”
That was it.
But the missing ink didn’t mean the missing influence.
Once I understood the rhythms of the era—how estates were managed, how alliances were built, how households ran, how children were raised, how faith shaped every corner of life—I began to read between the lines.
If a man was imprisoned, someone held the family together.
If a laird died, someone kept the estate running until the heir reached his majority.
If a clan feud erupted, someone negotiated the marriages that ended it.
If a household survived famine, that wasn’t an accident.
If a lineage continued, someone bore the physical, emotional, and political cost of that continuation.
And almost every time, that “someone” was a woman whose name is barely legible in the surviving record.
They weren’t invisible.
They were indispensable.
So when I write Elspeth, Lady Skene, Lady Forbes, Margaret Douglas, Mary of Guise—or any woman in my novels—I’m not imagining what a woman might have done.
I’m writing what a woman did do, even if the archive reduced her to a single line.
That understanding changed the way I tell stories.
It changed the way I see my ancestors.
It changed the way I see myself.
How This Shaped Elspeth—and the Heart of My Trilogy
When I began writing Elspeth, I wasn’t trying to give her modern ideals or turn her into something the 16th century wouldn’t recognize. I wanted to understand what life actually looked like for a woman whose choices were shaped—sometimes narrowed—by her family, her faith, her alliances, and the politics of her time.
Women then didn’t operate outside the system.
They moved within it, around it, and sometimes in spite of it.
And their decisions mattered, even when the records don’t spell those decisions out.
Elspeth reflects that truth.
She isn’t a symbol.
She isn’t a lesson.
She is a young woman trying to make sense of the world she inherited, making decisions with the information she has, and learning—sometimes painfully—that every choice carries something with it.
She loves deeply.
She misjudges.
She hopes for more than her circumstances allow.
She takes risks she can’t always explain, even to herself.
She endures losses she didn’t choose.
And she keeps going, because most women did.
Not to prove anything, not to rewrite the rules of her century, but because life kept moving and she had to move with it.
That’s the heart of The Legacy of Alba Trilogy: ordinary women navigating extraordinary pressures, shaping the course of their families and communities in ways the official record rarely reflects.
Their strength wasn’t theatrical.
It was practical.
It showed up in day-to-day choices—some small, some not—that held entire households, estates, and futures together.
Elspeth stands in that lineage, and so does every woman who came after her.
Why These Stories Matter Now
The farther I went into Scotland’s past, the more I recognized something familiar—not in the politics or the customs, but in the way women moved through their lives.
Most of us today aren’t navigating clan alliances or royal courts.
But we do know what it feels like to live inside expectations we didn’t choose.
To weigh our own needs against the needs of a family.
To carry responsibilities quietly because there’s no one else standing by to pick them up.
We know what it is to hope for something more.
To feel torn between roles.
To take care of others even when we’re stretched thin.
To make decisions we never imagined we’d have to make.
That’s why I write these women with so much care.
Not to romanticize the past, and not to simplify it, but to show that the women who came before us—named or unnamed—lived with the same mix of courage, uncertainty, devotion, or frustration, that women carry now.
They weren’t relics.
They weren’t side characters.
They were whole people navigating the boundaries of their world as best they could.
And the truth is, we still do that—every day.
We inherit more than names and physical traits.
We inherit patterns of insight, perseverance, choices, and instinct.
We inherit the culmination of a long line of women who made the best of what they were given and still found ways to influence what came next.
A Thread in Time is my way of honoring them—and of speaking to the women who read my work now, the ones who will recognize pieces of themselves in Elspeth and the others, whether they expect to or not.
