Mary Findlater (1865–1963) and Jane Findlater Biography

Scottish novelists; they wrote separately, but their three novels written in collaboration (Crossriggs, 1908; Penny Moneypenny, 1911; and Beneath the Visiting Moon, 1923) exceeded their individual productions in both subtlety and intensity. Jane, whose much praised novel The Green Graves of Balgowrie (1896) has a ballad-like quality, endowed the books with their sense of the numinous and the tragic, while Mary provided the social analysis and comedy. Crossriggs, the study of interrelated lives in a village near Edinburgh, is distinguished by a wry humour, the constant play of poetry, and the presence of forces that overtake the individual, above all the sexual. This last is in evidence in Penny Moneypenny, the male protagonist of which is plainly based on Robert Louis Stevenson. Admired by Henry James and Virginia Woolf, among others, the Findlater sisters are now seldom read.