What Flora Did Next

A Scottish historian shares her thrilling discovery that the Jacobite heroine went on to further dramatic exploits across the Atlantic

- DAWN GEDDES

ACCLAIMED historian Flora Fraser A has penned a number of A biographies on fascinating women including Emma, Lady Hamilton, Pauline Bonaparte and the six daughters of George III. Her latest subject is a figure close to her heart - her namesake, Flora MacDonald.

As the author prepares for her event at Edinburgh International Book Festival, I catch up with her to find out more about her lifelong interest in Flora.

"This is a very personal book in a way, because I was named after Flora and I grew up in an area of Inverness-shire which was rich in Jacobite history. There really was never a time when I didn't know the story of Flora McDonald, but I didn't know anything about her later years - those really took me by surprise."

Pretty Young Rebel opens in 1746. The Jacobite rebellion has fallen catastrophically, and Scotland is reeling in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden. On an island in the Outer Hebrides, 24-year-old Flora MacDonald is woken by a messenger. Bonnie Prince Charlie is outside, begging for her help.

But while many of us have read accounts of how, with Flora's assistance, the Stuart prince was disguised as an Irish maid and smuggled to the Isle of Skye, Fraser takes her book far beyond that point. She examines Flora's existence after this life-altering event; her capture and detention in London, her return to Skye, her marriage and emigration to North Carolina, and how she came to be caught up in the American Revolutionary War.

"It wasn't until I was writing my last book about George and Martha Washington that I came across Flora's portrait among a sheaf of American revolutionaries' portraits. It made me stop and think, What's this? How is a Jacobite heroine of 1746 connected with these patriots in the 1770s on the other side of the Atlantic?

The author says that as soon as she found out about this aspect of Flora's life, she was absolutely itching to write about her.