Christina Blackie

Christina Blackie was a Scottish writer associated with 19th-century popular geography and reference writing. She is best known for Etymological Geography, first published in 1875, a book that explores the origins and meanings of place names from around the world.

Her work was influential enough to be used as the basis for later studies of place-name meanings; a 1904 reference book, Place-name Synonyms, Classified by Austin Farmar, explicitly says it was based on Miss Blackie’s Etymological Geography. That suggests her writing found a readership beyond general audiences and was valued by later compilers and researchers.

Detailed biographical information about her appears to be scarce in the sources I could confirm here, so it is safest to remember her as a learned and accessible writer whose surviving reputation rests on making geographical names and their histories interesting to ordinary readers.