Excuse my dust: Christian Isobel Johnstone
Nigella Lawson meets Margaret Oliphant?
‘cultivating the profession of authorship with no … loss of feminity’
(M. F. Conolly, Biographical dictionary of eminent men of Fife, 1866)
'The writer unites the affection of a mother, the vigilance of an aunt, and the skill of a governess, with the grace and elegance of a well-bred lady' (Advertisement for Edinburgh Tales, 1845)
Who was she?
Born in Edinburgh in 1781, Christian Isobel Todd married a schoolmaster, John Johnstone, in 1815, the year her best-selling novel Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published. In 1817 the Johnstones moved to Inverness where they edited the Inverness Courier. In 1824 they returned to Edinburgh where Johnstone continued to write novels and, with her husband, was involved in writing for and editing several journals including Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, a radical opponent of the conservative Blackwood’s Magazine. The 19th century was the golden age of the serious periodical, and Johnstone was the first British woman to edit a major journal, prefiguring later Scottish women who made a living from these journals such as Margaret Oliphant. She died in 1857.
As literary editor of Tait’s, Johnstone was supportive of other women writers such as Mary Russell Mitford, who contributed to the magazine. Besides her fiction, she also published the much-reprinted The Cook and Housewife’s Manual (1826, as ‘Mrs Margaret (Meg) Dods), based on newspaper columns she first published in the Inverness Courier, and a children’s book The Diversions of Hollycot; or, the Mother’s Art of Thinking (1828).