The Edinburgh Skating Club
The story recounts how poet Alison Cockburn accepts a challenge from philosopher David Hume and his sister Katherine to bring her intellect to bear on the many clubs and societies of 18th-century Edinburgh – all of which are open only to men. Hence Alison transmogrifies into the popular man-about-town Francis Pringle. Her impersonation is aided by an unusual authorial stratagem – the consistent use of male pronouns. This is disconcerting, but it renders just-believable the scenes where Alison-as-Pringle mixes undetected with such historical personages as Adam Smith, Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns, who all knew her as Alison. I felt that applying the male-dress masquerade trope to a historically real woman was pushing the conceit a little too far.
Mirroring the historical friendship between middle-aged women Alison and Katherine is an amusing modern couple, university historians Clare Sharp and Jenny Brodie. They are drawn into a strange conspiracy to prove that the famous picture by Henry Raeburn, The Skating Minister, is in fact by another artist and of another subject. Outside Scotland, not everyone knows that there has been a real controversy over the authorship of this picture. Once I had learned of this, I further enjoyed Clare and Jenny’s detective work in museums and archives. But these scenes would be better if some conclusions had been left implicit, for the reader to draw.
The best aspect of the book is the way Sloan incrementally builds up a plot of some complexity and provides an enjoyable symmetry between period and modern scenes – for example, where the two modern historians see the small Edinburgh wall plaque dedicated to Cockburn and declare it a very inadequate memorial.
