Agnes Mure Mackenzie
Agnes Mure Mackenzie | |
---|---|
Born | 9 April 1891 Stornoway, Scotland |
Died | 26 February 1955 (aged 63) |
Occupation | Historian |
Agnes Mure Mackenzie CBE (9 April 1891 – 26 February 1955) was a Scottish historian and writer. Her middle name is frequently misspelled Muir.
Life
Mackenzie was the daughter of physician and surgeon Dr Murdoch Mackenzie and Sarah Agnes Mackenzie (née Drake); Agnes was born in Stornoway on Lewis,[1] then a busy fishing port. In childhood she was taken seriously ill with scarlet fever, the after-effects of which left her with poor hearing and eyesight. Educated at home until the age of fourteen, she then attended the Nicolson Institute until the age of seventeen. She then left Lewis for Aberdeen. As an undergraduate at the University of Aberdeen she studied English literature and edited the university magazine.
During the
It appeared as though Mackenzie would return to working as an educator when she was hired to teach an adult education course on Scottish literature. However, enrollments for the course were insufficient and it was cancelled. She made use of her preparations for teaching the course to produce An Historical Survey of Scottish Literature to 1714, published in 1933. This work also led to her 1934 biography of King
Robert Bruce, King of Scots was retrospectively subsumed into Mackenzie's six-volume history of Scotland as volume two. The other volumes were The Foundations of Scotland (1938), The Rise of the Stewarts (1935), The Scotland of Queen Mary and the religious wars 1513–1638 (1936), The Passing of the Stewarts (1937), and Scotland in modern times 1720–1939 (1941). The single-volume The Kingdom of Scotland: a short History appeared in 1940, while a school textbook history, A History of Britain and Europe for Scottish Schools, was published in 1949. She also produced a four-volume series, Scottish Pageant (1946–1950), which presented translated excerpts from documents relating to Scotland for a mass audience. A member of the
She was made a commander of the
References and further reading
- ^ OCLC 1057237368.
- Donaldson, William, " Mackenzie, Agnes Mure (1891–1955)" in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford, 2004. Online edition
- Noble, Joan Morrison, "An Islander in Exile: Agnes Mure Mackenzie & Memories of the Hebrides" in History Scotland, volume 7, number 1 (January/February 2006), pp. 23–29. ISSN 1475-5270
- Noble, Joan Morrison, "Dr. Agnes Mure Mackenzie: The Journey from Novelist to Historian" in History Scotland, volume 8, number 1 (January/February 2007), pp. 49–53. ISSN 1475-5270
- Shepherd, Nan, "Agnes Mure Mackenzie. C.B.E., M.A., D.Litt., LL.D. A Portrait" in Aberdeen University Review, volume 36 (1955–1956), pp. 132–140
- Smith, Nadia Clare, "Nationalism, Gender, and Irish and Scottish Historiography, 1919–1939: A Comparison of Helena Concannon and Agne Mure Mackenzie" in Alexander, Murphy & Oakman (eds), To the other Shore: Cross-currents in Irish and Scottish Studies. Belfast, 2004. (Proceedings of the April 2002 Cross-Currents conference at the University of Aberdeen.)
External links
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