Annie Shepherd Swan, CBE (8 July 1859 – 17 June 1943) was a Scottish journalist and fiction writer. She wrote mainly under her maiden name, but also as David Lyall and later Mrs Burnett Smith. A writer of romantic fiction for women, she had over 200 novels, serials, stories and other fiction published between 1878 and her death. She has been called "one of the most commercially successful popular novelists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". Swan was politically active in the First World War, and as a suffragist, a Liberal activist and founder-member and vice-president of the Scottish National Party.
Early life
Swan was born on 8 July 1859 in Mountskip, Gorebridge, Scotland. She was one of the seven children of Edward Swan (died 1893), a farmer and merchant, by his first wife, Euphemia Brown (died 1881). After her father's business failed, she attended school in Edinburgh, latterly at Queen Street Ladies College. Her father belonged to an Evangelical Union congregation, but she turned in adulthood to the Church of Scotland. She persistently wrote fiction as a teenager.
Writings
Her first publication was Wrongs Righted (1881), as a serial in The People's Friend. This periodical she long saw as the mainstay of her career, although she contributed to many others.
The novel that made her reputation was Aldersyde (1883), a romance set in the Scottish Borders that was favourably reviewed. Swan received an autographed letter of appreciation from Lord Tennyson. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone wrote to The Scotsman that he thought it "beautiful as a work of art" for its "truly living sketches of Scottish character".
