A Woman of Gallantry
Edinburgh, 1788: McNeill’s novel (first published in 1989) begins with the hanging of Deacon William Brodie, apparently upstanding member of the community by day and housebreaker by night; he was the inspiration for Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Hyde. Whilst the woman of gallantry of the title is Veronica Hay, the beautiful daughter of a widowed noblewoman in reduced circumstances, this is really the story of the slum child Helen Cameron who becomes her maid and trusted companion. Veronica is forced to marry for money; her husband is boorish and beats her, at a time when there was no legal protection against marital violence. Ultimately, she is caught in flagrante with an aristocratic neighbour, but it is the woman who pays, shamed as a ‘woman of gallantry,’ a female rake. Her unscrupulous lover is one for whom ‘hellfire…was the name of a club; heaven was a sexual transport with some complaisant woman’; he survives the scandal unscathed.
Alongside Veronica’s story is told that of Brodie’s illegitimate children, the repercussions for them of his disgrace, and the resourceful, astute and loyal Helen’s involvement with the two Brodie half-brothers. Edinburgh is also very much a character in this novel. The moneyed families of the decaying, teeming Old Town decamp to the wide streets and squares of the new city beyond what was the Nor Loch, far from the ‘gardy loo’ cries of the tenements. The scramble for accommodation for the visit of George IV in 1822 echoes the crowding of the city at Festival time. This engaging novel is rich in historical detail—a risp instead of a door knocker for instance—appropriately for a story based on historical events.
