Mary Brunton

Born on November 1, 1778, in Orkney, she was the daughter of Captain Thomas Balfour of Elwick. She married Alexander Brunton, a minister who later became a professor of Oriental languages at the University of Edinburgh, and her life moved between Scottish intellectual and religious circles.

She is best remembered for the novels Self-Control (1811) and Discipline (1814), both popular in their day for combining strong feeling with questions of character, faith, and moral choice. Her fiction was widely read in the early 1800s, and Self-Control in particular earned attention for its unusually resolute heroine.

She died on December 19, 1818. Though less widely read now than some of her contemporaries, she remains an important figure in Scottish and women’s writing of the Romantic period.