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Josephine Tey: A Life
Josephine Tey was the pen-name of Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896-1952). Born in Inverness, MacKintosh lived several ‘lives’: best known as Golden Age Crime Fiction writer ‘Josephine Tey’, she was also successful novelist and playwright ‘Gordon Daviot’. At one point, she had plays on simultaneously in the West End in London and on Broadway, and even wrote for Hollywood - all from her home in the north of Scotland.
482 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2015
About the author
Jennifer Morag Henderson
3 books4 followersJennifer Morag Henderson is a Scottish writer. Her most recent book is historical biography Daughters of the North: Jean Gordon and Mary, Queen of Scots (Whittles, 2025). Her biography in poetry Jofrid Gunn will be published in August by Shearsman Books.
Jennifer’s first book, Josephine Tey: A Life (Sandstone, 2015, republished 2021), is the first biography of Scottish crime writer, novelist and playwright Tey, aka Gordon Daviot or Elizabeth MacKintosh. It was listed as a Book of the Year by the Observer, Independent and Telegraph.
Jennifer’s first book, Josephine Tey: A Life (Sandstone, 2015, republished 2021), is the first biography of Scottish crime writer, novelist and playwright Tey, aka Gordon Daviot or Elizabeth MacKintosh. It was listed as a Book of the Year by the Observer, Independent and Telegraph.
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November 14, 2017
Ian Rankin is among the contemporary authors who cite Josephine Tey as an influence, and Tey is often cited as ‘Fifth’ after the ‘Big Four’ crime writers of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh – the essential exponents of crime fiction which all aficionados of the genre have at least a passing acquaintance with. Readers and critics talk about her books and recommend them to others.
And, yet, not much is generally known about Josephine Tey, or rather Elizabeth MacKintosh, because she was a very private person who kept her private affairs strictly separate from her work, and even in that she used several pen names to work in different genres.
With all of these smoke and mirrors, it is even more enjoyable to read a biography that does not just regurgitate the little that has been known about MacKintosh but that evidently presents the results of new research and the authors efforts to really dig through the archives and interview the few remaining people who knew MacKintosh.
Henderson also provides a wider view into the historical and literary background to MacKintosh's upbringing and the issues that influenced her writing - notably some of the hypocrisy of Inverness society.
In an earlier review of Tey's novel The Man in the Queue, I wondered whether "Tey may actually have tried to dispel some of the stereotypes found in the pulp fiction of her time".
Having read this biography, I believe that she indeed struggled with people's assumptions about other people of any difference to them, and that did use her books to dispel various assumptions.
Her upbringing and training instilled in her a love for history and a propensity for researching and questioning accepted facts. Her love for England at a time of the rise of Scottish nationalism, for which her very own home town of Inverness at the centre, caused her to question the importance of national identity. Her friends included people of all walks of life and this together with her disdain for the snobbishness of her neighbours in Inverness, only supported her approach to meet people on the basis of their character, not their background.
When I first picked up this biography, I had some concerns about whether Henderson, herself an Invernessian, would put forward a certain bias of town pride, but this concern was quickly abandoned. Henderson's description and analysis of the existing sources about MacKintosh, her writing, and the historical situation during MacKintosh's life quickly proved a fair and balanced assessment. And, let me say this again, Henderson's efforts in bringing up primary sources to back up her descriptions and statements about MacKintosh, has been really impressive.
This was a brick of a book and I loved every page, and I am now even more eager than before to investigate the works Elizabeth MacKintosh aka Gordon Daviot aka Josephine Tey.
And, yet, not much is generally known about Josephine Tey, or rather Elizabeth MacKintosh, because she was a very private person who kept her private affairs strictly separate from her work, and even in that she used several pen names to work in different genres.
With all of these smoke and mirrors, it is even more enjoyable to read a biography that does not just regurgitate the little that has been known about MacKintosh but that evidently presents the results of new research and the authors efforts to really dig through the archives and interview the few remaining people who knew MacKintosh.
Henderson also provides a wider view into the historical and literary background to MacKintosh's upbringing and the issues that influenced her writing - notably some of the hypocrisy of Inverness society.
In an earlier review of Tey's novel The Man in the Queue, I wondered whether "Tey may actually have tried to dispel some of the stereotypes found in the pulp fiction of her time".
Having read this biography, I believe that she indeed struggled with people's assumptions about other people of any difference to them, and that did use her books to dispel various assumptions.
Her upbringing and training instilled in her a love for history and a propensity for researching and questioning accepted facts. Her love for England at a time of the rise of Scottish nationalism, for which her very own home town of Inverness at the centre, caused her to question the importance of national identity. Her friends included people of all walks of life and this together with her disdain for the snobbishness of her neighbours in Inverness, only supported her approach to meet people on the basis of their character, not their background.
When I first picked up this biography, I had some concerns about whether Henderson, herself an Invernessian, would put forward a certain bias of town pride, but this concern was quickly abandoned. Henderson's description and analysis of the existing sources about MacKintosh, her writing, and the historical situation during MacKintosh's life quickly proved a fair and balanced assessment. And, let me say this again, Henderson's efforts in bringing up primary sources to back up her descriptions and statements about MacKintosh, has been really impressive.
This was a brick of a book and I loved every page, and I am now even more eager than before to investigate the works Elizabeth MacKintosh aka Gordon Daviot aka Josephine Tey.
December 9, 2015
2 things:
1) this isbn (9781910124703) is for the UK version which I picked up at Book Depository. The hardcover edition is not yet available in the US, but never fear -- there is an e-book available for anyone who wants to read this book.
2) I have to thank Keara at Sandstone who commented on a post I made about Tey's The Franchise Affair, asking me if I'd be interested in reading this book. At the time I said no because frankly I detest e-books, so I bought my copy. But without her, I may have not known for some time that this book even existed. So, thanks, Keara!!
I have posted about this book at my online reading journal, so if you want the whole enchilada written strictly from the pov of an avid Tey fan, click on this link.
otherwise, here's the gist:
As writer Val McDermid notes about Tey in her introduction to this book,
"Biographical information has always been scant, mostly because that's the way this most private of authors wanted it. The brief details on her book jackets reveal that Tey was born Elizabeth MacKintosh and that she also enjoyed success under another pseudonym -- Gordon Daviot, author of the West End hit Richard of Bordeaux, the springboard that launched John Gielgud to stardom.
Sometimes they mention that she was a native of Inverness who lived most of her life there. But until now, Josephine Tey was herself the greatest mystery at the heart of her fiction." (xviii)
Well, that's all changed now with the publication of Jennifer Morag Henderson's Josephine Tey: A Life. Henderson has done an invaluable service to Tey fans everywhere through her meticulous research: as McDermid reveals, Henderson has been through Tey's family papers, as well as material that's never been published before to produce this simply amazing biography that
"gives us the chance to understand what shaped Beth MacKintosh into the writer she became." (xix)
As the author explains, the book "aims to present the story of Beth's life -- of her many different lives..." and to set her "full body of work" in terms of Tey's life and within "the context of the literary canon." It seems to me that Ms. Henderson has most deftly and most thoroughly accomplished what she set out to do here. Tey was not just an amazing novelist (as most readers of her work like myself consider her), but also a well-established, well-respected playwright whose performances featured such actors as John Gielgud; she was also a screenwriter (which I did not know), a devoted daughter who helped take care of the family business and then her father and their home when he became very ill, and through it all, she continuously shunned the limelight, preferring her private life over her public one.
Sterling, superb, and all manner of superlatives -- this book is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in Josephine Tey. She is one of my all-time favorite mystery novelists, but as Henderson illustrates here, her career and her life go well beyond just that of a few books. Definitely and most highly recommended.
1) this isbn (9781910124703) is for the UK version which I picked up at Book Depository. The hardcover edition is not yet available in the US, but never fear -- there is an e-book available for anyone who wants to read this book.
2) I have to thank Keara at Sandstone who commented on a post I made about Tey's The Franchise Affair, asking me if I'd be interested in reading this book. At the time I said no because frankly I detest e-books, so I bought my copy. But without her, I may have not known for some time that this book even existed. So, thanks, Keara!!
I have posted about this book at my online reading journal, so if you want the whole enchilada written strictly from the pov of an avid Tey fan, click on this link.
otherwise, here's the gist:
As writer Val McDermid notes about Tey in her introduction to this book,
"Biographical information has always been scant, mostly because that's the way this most private of authors wanted it. The brief details on her book jackets reveal that Tey was born Elizabeth MacKintosh and that she also enjoyed success under another pseudonym -- Gordon Daviot, author of the West End hit Richard of Bordeaux, the springboard that launched John Gielgud to stardom.
Sometimes they mention that she was a native of Inverness who lived most of her life there. But until now, Josephine Tey was herself the greatest mystery at the heart of her fiction." (xviii)
Well, that's all changed now with the publication of Jennifer Morag Henderson's Josephine Tey: A Life. Henderson has done an invaluable service to Tey fans everywhere through her meticulous research: as McDermid reveals, Henderson has been through Tey's family papers, as well as material that's never been published before to produce this simply amazing biography that
"gives us the chance to understand what shaped Beth MacKintosh into the writer she became." (xix)
As the author explains, the book "aims to present the story of Beth's life -- of her many different lives..." and to set her "full body of work" in terms of Tey's life and within "the context of the literary canon." It seems to me that Ms. Henderson has most deftly and most thoroughly accomplished what she set out to do here. Tey was not just an amazing novelist (as most readers of her work like myself consider her), but also a well-established, well-respected playwright whose performances featured such actors as John Gielgud; she was also a screenwriter (which I did not know), a devoted daughter who helped take care of the family business and then her father and their home when he became very ill, and through it all, she continuously shunned the limelight, preferring her private life over her public one.
Sterling, superb, and all manner of superlatives -- this book is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in Josephine Tey. She is one of my all-time favorite mystery novelists, but as Henderson illustrates here, her career and her life go well beyond just that of a few books. Definitely and most highly recommended.
Read
July 15, 2016While Tey is fascinating, this book is strange.
Biography is a more difficult genre than people think, it has its own expectations and conventions. Henderson isn't an experienced biographer, and it shows in little ways, most especially in her control of the material. A biography is a life story told, generally, in order, and if it's not in chronological order there should be thematic reasons for it not to be. It's all right to jump ahead, but it shouldn't be unclear when you do. You can assume the reader knows something about the subject -- they picked the book up, didn't they -- but you can't assume they know everything, or why are they reading the book? With a literary subject, you need to discuss the works, and you have to do it the right amount, neither too much or too little. If you have made a discovery, don't puff it off too much too early -- when this book said it had found an entirely new pseudonym and talked about it as if it was equivalent to the Tey and Daviot names, I was expecting more than one play.
A good biography will make the reader feel they know the subject. This one made me feel I knew more facts about Tey, but left her as opaque as ever. I'm not sorry I read it, but it's not a good biography and I can't recommend it to anyone but Tey fanatics, which is a pity.
Biography is a more difficult genre than people think, it has its own expectations and conventions. Henderson isn't an experienced biographer, and it shows in little ways, most especially in her control of the material. A biography is a life story told, generally, in order, and if it's not in chronological order there should be thematic reasons for it not to be. It's all right to jump ahead, but it shouldn't be unclear when you do. You can assume the reader knows something about the subject -- they picked the book up, didn't they -- but you can't assume they know everything, or why are they reading the book? With a literary subject, you need to discuss the works, and you have to do it the right amount, neither too much or too little. If you have made a discovery, don't puff it off too much too early -- when this book said it had found an entirely new pseudonym and talked about it as if it was equivalent to the Tey and Daviot names, I was expecting more than one play.
A good biography will make the reader feel they know the subject. This one made me feel I knew more facts about Tey, but left her as opaque as ever. I'm not sorry I read it, but it's not a good biography and I can't recommend it to anyone but Tey fanatics, which is a pity.
August 15, 2020
There is very little known about Josephine Tey, but Henderson does a good job gathering what facts are available and intertwining them with an analysis of her work, both as a playwright, historian and mystery writer.
July 5, 2016
I have long been a fan of the Josephine Tey crime novels and know that the author (real name Elizabeth MacKintosh) has always been described as 'enigmatic', 'reserved' and 'private', meaning that no-one knows much about her. This biography by Jennifer Morag Henderson is the first that really delves into her life to uncover her family background, her schooling, how she began writing, her relationships and her personality through diaries, documents, manuscripts, family papers and interviews. I guess she used the 'Josephine Tey' pseudonym in the title because that's what most people know. However, it is really a biography of Elizabeth MacKintosh. Henderson tries to allocate a couple of romantic attachments to MacKintosh but the evidence is so weak I thought it a shame she felt she had to do this. The book also painstakingly documents all her works (her poems and short stories, her plays written under another pseudonym Gordon Daviot, and her crime/mystery novels as Josephine Tey) as well as describing how she coped with the two world wars, her Hollywood script writing period and the people she knew. Interesting asides let us know that a young and unknown Laurence Olivier was in one of her plays.
The book needs a good editor as facts are repeated in every chapter in case the reader has forgotten; for example Dodie Smith (of '101 Dalmatians' fame) is a good friend but this is repeated every time Smith is mentioned. In a bid to document as much as she can about this author, Henderson details everything she has researched, including very lengthy bits about the parents to show how her upbringing influenced her writing (I got a bit confused here with all the relatives mentioned). Henderson also goes off into unnecessary tangents that annoyed me; for example one of MacKintosh's plays (under the Daviot name) is to be performed by a theatre and so, as well as a lot of information about the negotiations for the play, we get the history of the theatre, who runs it, they plays they have performed there, actors who have appeared there - all superfluous detail.
MacKintosh divided her time between Inverness and London and much is made in the book of her pro-British stance and her unwillingness to promote Scottish nationalism in her literature, a fact that evidently loomed large in her life, was a source of annoyance to her and left the people of Inverness feeling she had shunned them. A lot of this is repeated at length throughout the book.
At the end though, the reader does know more about MacKintosh and what drove her and why her Josephine Tey crime/mystery novels are still eagerly sought and read today.
The book needs a good editor as facts are repeated in every chapter in case the reader has forgotten; for example Dodie Smith (of '101 Dalmatians' fame) is a good friend but this is repeated every time Smith is mentioned. In a bid to document as much as she can about this author, Henderson details everything she has researched, including very lengthy bits about the parents to show how her upbringing influenced her writing (I got a bit confused here with all the relatives mentioned). Henderson also goes off into unnecessary tangents that annoyed me; for example one of MacKintosh's plays (under the Daviot name) is to be performed by a theatre and so, as well as a lot of information about the negotiations for the play, we get the history of the theatre, who runs it, they plays they have performed there, actors who have appeared there - all superfluous detail.
MacKintosh divided her time between Inverness and London and much is made in the book of her pro-British stance and her unwillingness to promote Scottish nationalism in her literature, a fact that evidently loomed large in her life, was a source of annoyance to her and left the people of Inverness feeling she had shunned them. A lot of this is repeated at length throughout the book.
At the end though, the reader does know more about MacKintosh and what drove her and why her Josephine Tey crime/mystery novels are still eagerly sought and read today.
April 1, 2016
Embarrassing thing to admit - I have never read a Josephine Tey book. I ordered a second-hand book containing three of her novels, not expecting to get through this pretty large book so quickly, but as of finishing it, I'm still awaiting their arrival. I do have one on my Kindle, which I'll read as soon as I find the time with all the Blog Tours I'm doing. Apart from Agatha Christie, I need to read more Golden Age authors - and I'd quite like to read more AC too! I was intrigued to learn JT (real name Elizabeth MacKintosh) taught PE at Oban High School for a couple of months, and an accident in the gym there was inspiration for the murder in Miss Pym Disposes.
A full review will appear on https://crimeworm.wordpress.com/ - there's something I want to check with my Dad that I don't think is correct at all. However, I did enjoy the descriptions of "Old Inverness" before it became, at one point, the fastest growing city in Europe.
A full review will appear on https://crimeworm.wordpress.com/ - there's something I want to check with my Dad that I don't think is correct at all. However, I did enjoy the descriptions of "Old Inverness" before it became, at one point, the fastest growing city in Europe.
June 22, 2025
Excellent research which should have resulted in a better book.
Years ago I read one of Josephine Tey's mysteries and was hooked like a large-mouth bass. I eventually acquired all of them and was impressed with the author's skill and her reckless style. Not for this woman the tame "series" of mysteries in which a detective solves the same kind of crimes over and over.
She DID have a detective (Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard) who appears in six of her eight mysteries, but in some he's a major character, while in others he's peripheral to the action. And in the last two, he's absent entirely.
All of her mysteries are quirky and each is quirky in its own way. Her books sold well right from the start and have never been out of print, but profit doesn't seem to have been her motive. If it had been, she would have written far more than eight mysteries. Perhaps every new project had to be a challenge, not just a rehashing of a previous, popular book.
Biographical information is sparse. Her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh and she was a Scot who wrote plays under the name "Gordon Daviot." English acting icon John Guilgud became famous when he appeared in a historical play written by Gordon Daviot.
I like to know something about the authors of books I enjoy so I was thrilled to find this biography of MacKintosh/Tey/Daviot. It answered most of my questions and parts of it are fascinating. A great deal of hard work must have gone into researching the life of this reclusive woman. I wish I could give it five stars and rave about it, but it needed better editing and that keeps it from being a really fine book.
The best parts are the ones about MacKintosh's family - how both sides found their way to Inverness, where her parents met and married. How the grinding poverty her father endured shaped him and turned him into a hard-working business owner. How her mother's English grandparents ended up in Scotland, looking for work.
The law that mandated free education for children through age 14 allowed her parents to rise above the servant/farm-worker class of their parents. And (especially) how the strict conservative society in Inverness created a woman who was internationally famous, yet still looked down on in her hometown because she was a shop-keeper's daughter.
So why did she stay in Inverness? Because her mother died young and (like generations of oldest daughters since time began) she was responsible for caring for her father. She loved London and the south of England, but couldn't live there full time until her father's death. Sadly, her own death followed not many years later.
The story of Elizabeth and her younger sisters is the story of the first half of the twentieth century. Two wars gutted two generations of young men and upended traditional society and the economy. The younger generation took advantage of greater educational opportunities.
The MacKintosh sisters moved beyond the strict confines of their their parents' lives, but their parents' intelligence and work ethic shaped their own success. Feminism (of a sort) was a given. The women worked along side of their men as equals, another thing that helped the MacKintosh sisters thrive in the competitive world of London and southern England.
My complaint is that (at 450+ pages) the book is too long. A good editor would have cut severely and also avoided the confusion when the author refers to her subject as "Beth", "Elizabeth", and "Gordon" all in the same chapter.
I was also offended by the author's insistence that Elizabeth MacKintosh was not involved romantically with any of the Lesbian actresses with whom she was close friends. The author produces evidence that young Elizabeth MacKintosh was fond of a soldier killed in WWI and had a romantic friendship with an Inverness poet who died young.
The author repeats many times that the severe hairstyle and mannish clothes in the photographs were fashionable at the time; that "Beth" was actually an attractive, feminine woman. Really, does it matter to anyone today? Would we enjoy her books any less if she HAD been a Lesbian or bi-sexual?
As a reader of her books, I was fascinated by the parts of her life that are reflected in her books, such as the fact that she attended a college of "physical training" very similar to the one she wrote about in "Miss Pym Disposes." And understanding that she was tied to Inverness, while not being valued there makes me understand her sometimes slighting references to Scotland and Scots in her books.
Her Inspector Grant is part Scot and loves to go to the Highlands to fish, but in "The Singing Sands" he's anxious for his cousin's young son (aged six or seven) to be sent away as soon as possible to his English boarding school. The kid's just too "Scots" to suit Grant and he'll only approve of him when a tony English boys' school has taught him to be an English gentleman. It's a harsh attitude, but I now know WHY MacKintosh leaned toward her English heritage. It was in southern England that she was finally appreciated and respected.
Carved down by 100 pages and stripped of repetition, it would have been a biography worthy of the fine writer who gave us those memorable mysteries. If you haven't discovered the eight mysteries written by "Josephine Tey" between 1929 and 1949, you've missed some outstanding books.
Years ago I read one of Josephine Tey's mysteries and was hooked like a large-mouth bass. I eventually acquired all of them and was impressed with the author's skill and her reckless style. Not for this woman the tame "series" of mysteries in which a detective solves the same kind of crimes over and over.
She DID have a detective (Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard) who appears in six of her eight mysteries, but in some he's a major character, while in others he's peripheral to the action. And in the last two, he's absent entirely.
All of her mysteries are quirky and each is quirky in its own way. Her books sold well right from the start and have never been out of print, but profit doesn't seem to have been her motive. If it had been, she would have written far more than eight mysteries. Perhaps every new project had to be a challenge, not just a rehashing of a previous, popular book.
Biographical information is sparse. Her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh and she was a Scot who wrote plays under the name "Gordon Daviot." English acting icon John Guilgud became famous when he appeared in a historical play written by Gordon Daviot.
I like to know something about the authors of books I enjoy so I was thrilled to find this biography of MacKintosh/Tey/Daviot. It answered most of my questions and parts of it are fascinating. A great deal of hard work must have gone into researching the life of this reclusive woman. I wish I could give it five stars and rave about it, but it needed better editing and that keeps it from being a really fine book.
The best parts are the ones about MacKintosh's family - how both sides found their way to Inverness, where her parents met and married. How the grinding poverty her father endured shaped him and turned him into a hard-working business owner. How her mother's English grandparents ended up in Scotland, looking for work.
The law that mandated free education for children through age 14 allowed her parents to rise above the servant/farm-worker class of their parents. And (especially) how the strict conservative society in Inverness created a woman who was internationally famous, yet still looked down on in her hometown because she was a shop-keeper's daughter.
So why did she stay in Inverness? Because her mother died young and (like generations of oldest daughters since time began) she was responsible for caring for her father. She loved London and the south of England, but couldn't live there full time until her father's death. Sadly, her own death followed not many years later.
The story of Elizabeth and her younger sisters is the story of the first half of the twentieth century. Two wars gutted two generations of young men and upended traditional society and the economy. The younger generation took advantage of greater educational opportunities.
The MacKintosh sisters moved beyond the strict confines of their their parents' lives, but their parents' intelligence and work ethic shaped their own success. Feminism (of a sort) was a given. The women worked along side of their men as equals, another thing that helped the MacKintosh sisters thrive in the competitive world of London and southern England.
My complaint is that (at 450+ pages) the book is too long. A good editor would have cut severely and also avoided the confusion when the author refers to her subject as "Beth", "Elizabeth", and "Gordon" all in the same chapter.
I was also offended by the author's insistence that Elizabeth MacKintosh was not involved romantically with any of the Lesbian actresses with whom she was close friends. The author produces evidence that young Elizabeth MacKintosh was fond of a soldier killed in WWI and had a romantic friendship with an Inverness poet who died young.
The author repeats many times that the severe hairstyle and mannish clothes in the photographs were fashionable at the time; that "Beth" was actually an attractive, feminine woman. Really, does it matter to anyone today? Would we enjoy her books any less if she HAD been a Lesbian or bi-sexual?
As a reader of her books, I was fascinated by the parts of her life that are reflected in her books, such as the fact that she attended a college of "physical training" very similar to the one she wrote about in "Miss Pym Disposes." And understanding that she was tied to Inverness, while not being valued there makes me understand her sometimes slighting references to Scotland and Scots in her books.
Her Inspector Grant is part Scot and loves to go to the Highlands to fish, but in "The Singing Sands" he's anxious for his cousin's young son (aged six or seven) to be sent away as soon as possible to his English boarding school. The kid's just too "Scots" to suit Grant and he'll only approve of him when a tony English boys' school has taught him to be an English gentleman. It's a harsh attitude, but I now know WHY MacKintosh leaned toward her English heritage. It was in southern England that she was finally appreciated and respected.
Carved down by 100 pages and stripped of repetition, it would have been a biography worthy of the fine writer who gave us those memorable mysteries. If you haven't discovered the eight mysteries written by "Josephine Tey" between 1929 and 1949, you've missed some outstanding books.
January 15, 2019
Carefully and scrupulously researched. First full biography considering the life and work of Elizabeth MacIntosh, aka Gordon Daviot, aka Josephine Tey. Proceeds largely chronologically and makes inferences that the author has carefully considered, although they might not convince the readers of this work. Prose is mostly workmanlike and sometimes more repetitive than needed. I found it didn't detract from the laudable effort to shine light into the underexplored real life of this writer whose detective works have never gone out of print, and makes a firm argument for including her in the ranks of foremost Scottish writers. Recommended to those wanting a thorough look at Daviot/Tey and Beth MacIntosh.
January 23, 2023
She was born Elizabeth MacIntosh, but she is known to connoisseurs of crime fiction and to Ricardians as Josephine Tey, the author of The Daughter of Time, and other highly regarded novels. As Gordon Daviot, she became a renowned playwright in London in the 1930’s, writing Richard of Bordeaux which launched John Gielgud into superstardom. Her life story has been characterized as enigmatic. This well researched book gives us a much clearer picture of her life.
Tey’s father came from the benighted northwest of Scotland to become a successful shopkeeper, a fruiterer, but he was always looked down on by Inversegian society. Both he and her mother, Josephine, wanted their three daughters to have a good education and paid for Tey to attend a Physical Training College in England. Tey was an Anglophile and ended up working as a teacher at several locations there. When her mother became ill and died in 1923, Tey returned to Inverness to keep house for her father—for the rest of her life While keeping house, she wrote poems, short stories, and novels. Her first novel Kif> tells the story of a soldier back from the First World War. One of her sisters revealed that Tey had a romance with an unidentified soldier who died at the Battle of the Somme, and the author looks at the little bits of evidence to try to identify this young man. Perhaps, Gordon Barber, suggested by her later use of the pen name Gordon Daviot? ( Daviot is a place name in the area?) Later in the 1920’s she did have a romance with a returning soldier, Hugh Patrick Fraser, who was a fellow writer and poet, but he did not long survive.
As an unknown playwright, she found success when her play Richard of Bordeaux was a hit. She formed life-long friendships with people in the London theater scene, including John Gielgud. She is often characterized as a loner because her theater friends did reveal much about her life in Inverness. In Inverness she had taken part in the writer’s community with Fraser, but she didn’t seem to have an active social life otherwise. She kept house, wrote, and attended the cinema twice a week. She visited her friends in England regularly, moved in theatrical circles and attended parties. Her life was compartmentalized.
The biography documents all of her work and is in roughly chronological order focusing on the works she was producing at the time. In the early 1930’s, she was writing plays:Richard of Bordeaux, The Laughing Woman, and Queen of Scots.. But Alan Grant mysteries first appeared in this decade as well. During the Second World War, she worked on one act plays. Her best known work were her post-war crime novels and to these she attached the name Josephine Tey, rather than Gordon Daviot she used on her plays. The switch does not indicate that she held crime novels in less regard than her plays. On the contrary, she said the detective novel was a “medium as disciplined as any sonnet.”
The book unnecessarily goes into exhaustive detail about Tey’s extended family in the beginning. It also repeats details needlessly. For example, almost every time Tey’s friend Dodie Smith is mentioned, it is noted that she wrote 101 Dalmatians. A major focus for the author is Tey’s place as a Scottish author. Her work has been ignored in Scottish literary circles, perhaps because, opines the author, of a bias against the crime novel genre, but also because she never embraced the Scottish Nationalist cause. As the author points out, Tey’s powerful stories continue to be read and enjoyed, and she should be celebrated in Scotland. Reading about these detective novels has reminded me how much I enjoyed reading them, and makes me want to read them again. 3.5⭐️
August 16, 2017
Mention Josephine Tey (1896–1952) to a reader of detective novels, and you may be told she is in the same class as Agatha Christie—although Tey's novels are nothing like her contemporary's plot driven whodunnits, and Tey is by far the better writer. Tey cared less about clues and puzzles than she did about characters and the parameters of human nature. If you mention her to a historian, you may get a discussion of "The Daughter of Time," Tey's exhilarating takedown of the historical profession, which too often has relied on the words of the victorious, like those of Henry VII and his Tudor dynasty, which vilified the reputation of Richard III. Never mind that Tey’s defense of the Yorkist ruler was almost certainly wrong; her brilliant dramatization of historical method and her focus on the nexus between events and personalities, in the present and the past, is explain why in 1990 the British Crime Writers Association selected "The Daughter of Time" as the greatest mystery novel of all time.
At the center of Tey's six mysteries is detective Alan Grant, who is nothing like the hardboiled heroes of Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's novels, or like the gentleman sleuths that people the Dorothy Sayers school. Grant is not an intellectual, but he is a profound skeptic. He takes one look at a portrait of Richard III and sees a complex human being who has been traduced by Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare. More, on whom Shakespeare relied, was simply passing on Tudor propaganda, as Grant learns after he employs an aggressive American researcher, Brent Carradine, who discovers a lively set of revisionist biographies rehabilitating the crookback king. No book has done a better job of illustrating the excitement and profound pleasure of biographical and historical research.
Grant, by the way, is no superhero. What he discovers takes its toll. By the time Tey wrote "The Singing Sands" during the year she was diagnosed with fatal liver cancer, Grant is in bad shape, suffering a mental collapse from which he recovers only slowly and painfully. In short, what you get in Tey is a moving and profound exploration of human psychology, of what it means to be human, attuned to the mankind's troubles yet making the world a better place at great personal cost.
It is no surprise, then, that readers wrote to Tey's publishers in order to learn about who it was that wrote the novels. Because Tey had no interest in self-promotion, rarely granting interviews and sitting for few author's photographs, her mystique has become almost as great as Shakespeare's. Indeed, one of my university colleagues, steeped in Tey’s work, was certain the author was actually a man. Details about Tey’s life are so scarce that it has been generally supposed no biography could be written.
Fortunately Jennifer Morag Henderson’s effort rivals Alan Grant's detective work. She builds on the niggardly biographical jacket copy Tey approved as a sop to her readers to present a convincing account of a twentieth-century literary giant. Tey (actually the Scottish-born Elizabeth MacKintosh) may have wanted to protect her privacy, but she was a woman of the world, enjoying friendships with John Guilgud and other luminaries of the London stage. In fact, writing as Gordon Daviot, she made him a star in her play "Richard of Bordeaux," one of several dramas that, between the two world wars, made the name Gordon Daviot more famous in Britain than that of Josephine Tey. The celebrity of “Josephine Tey” would eclipse Daviot’s in the period after World War II,, when MacKintosh became immersed in the riveting world of Alan Grant.
MacKintosh used pseudonyms because she rejected the romantic notion of associating the writer with the work. She wanted the work, in other words, to justify itself. And though she long maintained a few intimate friendships in London, she remained with her aging father in Inverness, taking care of him while writing steadily, even as she did the housework with relatively little help. Because MacKintosh remained aloof not only from the cosmopolis but also her neighbors, who saw her mainly as the dutiful daughter of her fruiterer father, all kinds of rumors spread across the land. Because she never married and consorted with actresses, some suspected she was a lesbian. Such was not the case,, Henderson shows, describing a polite but firm rejection letter Mackintosh (signing herself with her playwright's name) wrote to an actress who very much wanted to initiate an affair. It seems likely that MacKintosh did fall in love twice: once to a soldier killed in World War I, and once to a poet (whose work she quotes in one of her novels) who died of tuberculosis after the war. One of the great achievements of this biography is Henderson demonstration that her subject led a far more romantic life than has been supposed.
MacKintosh also had a powerful connection to her father, who instilled a love of reading in her and who was bereft when his wife died young. Elizabeth—or Beth, as she was known to her family—took up her mother's role when her two sisters, far from home and with their own work and responsibilities, proved unable to assist. The relationship between father and daughter was not always easy, but in Ms. Henderson's account, this was the life Beth chose. She might well have lived elsewhere had it not been for her father's demanding but supportive presence. And had MacKintosh not died at fifty-five, the rest of her life could have been quite different, as Ms. Henderson adduces from the evidence she has discovered.
The biographer reveals the moving story of Elizabeth MacKintosh's life with tact and superior investigative tenacity. She has checked archives and census records, searched old newspapers, critically examined memoirs, and dispells much of the myth that has become the penumbra of Josephine Tey. Sometimes Ms. Henderson tries too hard, splattering her narrative with what "must have been." I would have preferred more use of words such as likely and probably. They seem less forced, and there is much we still do not know about the woman who became Josephine Tey.
At the center of Tey's six mysteries is detective Alan Grant, who is nothing like the hardboiled heroes of Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's novels, or like the gentleman sleuths that people the Dorothy Sayers school. Grant is not an intellectual, but he is a profound skeptic. He takes one look at a portrait of Richard III and sees a complex human being who has been traduced by Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare. More, on whom Shakespeare relied, was simply passing on Tudor propaganda, as Grant learns after he employs an aggressive American researcher, Brent Carradine, who discovers a lively set of revisionist biographies rehabilitating the crookback king. No book has done a better job of illustrating the excitement and profound pleasure of biographical and historical research.
Grant, by the way, is no superhero. What he discovers takes its toll. By the time Tey wrote "The Singing Sands" during the year she was diagnosed with fatal liver cancer, Grant is in bad shape, suffering a mental collapse from which he recovers only slowly and painfully. In short, what you get in Tey is a moving and profound exploration of human psychology, of what it means to be human, attuned to the mankind's troubles yet making the world a better place at great personal cost.
It is no surprise, then, that readers wrote to Tey's publishers in order to learn about who it was that wrote the novels. Because Tey had no interest in self-promotion, rarely granting interviews and sitting for few author's photographs, her mystique has become almost as great as Shakespeare's. Indeed, one of my university colleagues, steeped in Tey’s work, was certain the author was actually a man. Details about Tey’s life are so scarce that it has been generally supposed no biography could be written.
Fortunately Jennifer Morag Henderson’s effort rivals Alan Grant's detective work. She builds on the niggardly biographical jacket copy Tey approved as a sop to her readers to present a convincing account of a twentieth-century literary giant. Tey (actually the Scottish-born Elizabeth MacKintosh) may have wanted to protect her privacy, but she was a woman of the world, enjoying friendships with John Guilgud and other luminaries of the London stage. In fact, writing as Gordon Daviot, she made him a star in her play "Richard of Bordeaux," one of several dramas that, between the two world wars, made the name Gordon Daviot more famous in Britain than that of Josephine Tey. The celebrity of “Josephine Tey” would eclipse Daviot’s in the period after World War II,, when MacKintosh became immersed in the riveting world of Alan Grant.
MacKintosh used pseudonyms because she rejected the romantic notion of associating the writer with the work. She wanted the work, in other words, to justify itself. And though she long maintained a few intimate friendships in London, she remained with her aging father in Inverness, taking care of him while writing steadily, even as she did the housework with relatively little help. Because MacKintosh remained aloof not only from the cosmopolis but also her neighbors, who saw her mainly as the dutiful daughter of her fruiterer father, all kinds of rumors spread across the land. Because she never married and consorted with actresses, some suspected she was a lesbian. Such was not the case,, Henderson shows, describing a polite but firm rejection letter Mackintosh (signing herself with her playwright's name) wrote to an actress who very much wanted to initiate an affair. It seems likely that MacKintosh did fall in love twice: once to a soldier killed in World War I, and once to a poet (whose work she quotes in one of her novels) who died of tuberculosis after the war. One of the great achievements of this biography is Henderson demonstration that her subject led a far more romantic life than has been supposed.
MacKintosh also had a powerful connection to her father, who instilled a love of reading in her and who was bereft when his wife died young. Elizabeth—or Beth, as she was known to her family—took up her mother's role when her two sisters, far from home and with their own work and responsibilities, proved unable to assist. The relationship between father and daughter was not always easy, but in Ms. Henderson's account, this was the life Beth chose. She might well have lived elsewhere had it not been for her father's demanding but supportive presence. And had MacKintosh not died at fifty-five, the rest of her life could have been quite different, as Ms. Henderson adduces from the evidence she has discovered.
The biographer reveals the moving story of Elizabeth MacKintosh's life with tact and superior investigative tenacity. She has checked archives and census records, searched old newspapers, critically examined memoirs, and dispells much of the myth that has become the penumbra of Josephine Tey. Sometimes Ms. Henderson tries too hard, splattering her narrative with what "must have been." I would have preferred more use of words such as likely and probably. They seem less forced, and there is much we still do not know about the woman who became Josephine Tey.
March 6, 2025
This detailed biography of Elizabeth MacKintosh, who was born and bred in Inverness, the eldest of three sisters, reveals a great deal about a writer’s life in the Scottish Highlands … She first won fame as a playwright under the name “Gordon Daviot” … Her breakthrough was “Richard of Bordeaux,” starring a young John Gielgud … Later, she expanded into crime fiction as “Josephine Tey” … Dying in 1952, she failed to enjoy the success of many of her novels and plays … interesting read …
by
Gordon Daviot
by
Josephine Tey
by
Gordon Daviot
by
Josephine Tey
January 30, 2017
that was a lot of conjecture vs fact, hence the rating.
the author takes quite a bit of liberty with MacKintosh's personal life, which, as a private person myself, is bothersome to me.
and then, there is this: "Elizabeth achieved what she did through pure talent."
Talented - of course she was. Did talent manage her time as she attended to her father in Scotland while writing and visiting London to promote plays and books? Did talent physically produce the writing that has been revered for decades since? Hard work. Hard work, time management, dedication. Explaining this level of work away as 'talent' is an insult to MacKintosh and artists in general. This sentence, which appears early on, was particularly irksome and stuck with me throughout.
the author takes quite a bit of liberty with MacKintosh's personal life, which, as a private person myself, is bothersome to me.
and then, there is this: "Elizabeth achieved what she did through pure talent."
Talented - of course she was. Did talent manage her time as she attended to her father in Scotland while writing and visiting London to promote plays and books? Did talent physically produce the writing that has been revered for decades since? Hard work. Hard work, time management, dedication. Explaining this level of work away as 'talent' is an insult to MacKintosh and artists in general. This sentence, which appears early on, was particularly irksome and stuck with me throughout.
June 6, 2016
Several years ago a Josephine Tey book was recommended by a friend and I enjoyed all her detective novels . Then came along Nicola Upton with her detective novels using Josephine Tey and her life as the central character of her books. I was naturally drawn to read a biography of the lady to round out the life of a very successful writer and playwright. On the whole I Found it interesting and well written but occasionally some conclusions were somewhat speculative although possible but not enough fact to back it up. That rather spoiled it for me but on the whole worth 4 stars.
December 27, 2015
Quite a lot of useful information, though some sense that the author felt she had to put in All The Research, even of a very background nature. Some boss-shots concerning period contextual detail. Also felt that there was a certain amount of the 'she must have...' reading in beyond the known facts.
August 10, 2017
This book offers a fascinating look at the life of Tey. I enjoy biographies and Tey is one of my favorite mystery writers. Her often lonely life, her struggles, her family life are all subject to scrutiny in this biography. Well worth the read if you're a Tey fan.
October 7, 2020
The only legitimate biography on Scottish mystery writer and playwright, Josephine Tey aka Elizabeth MacKintosh, aka Gordon Daviot, aka F. Craigie Howe, Beth, Mac and Bessie.
Unlike Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey ignored the rules of golden-age British crime fiction—with brilliant results. But 60 years after her death, the greatest mystery Tey created still may be herself.
It begins with a body in the library. Two hundred pages later, when the police have exhausted all lines of inquiry and made hee-hawing jackasses of themselves, an amateur detective summons the dramatis personae to the same library—they may well include an actress, a tennis pro, an embittered widow, a disinherited younger son, and of course a butler—to reveal which of them is the killer.
That is the familiar template for crime fiction in the golden age, those years between the First and Second World Wars, when authors such as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers earned fortunes by satisfying an apparently limitless public appetite for corpses in English country houses. One of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels was actually titled The Body in the Library.
Christie and Sayers were founder-members of the Detection Club, a dining society formed in London in 1930. Recruits had to swear an initiation oath promising that their detectives “shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God.” A joke, no doubt, but this was kidding on the level. Like any game, mystery writing had its rules, which were codified into “Ten Commandments” by the British author Ronald Knox—who, fittingly enough, was also a Catholic priest. His prohibitions included accidental discoveries and unaccountable hunches, undeclared clues and hitherto unknown poisons.
“The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow,” Knox decreed. “The ‘stupid friend’ of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader…. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.”
No wonder Josephine Tey never belonged to the Detection Club. During her career as a crime novelist—from The Man in the Queue (1929) to The Singing Sands (published posthumously in 1952)—she broke almost all the commandments. As if willfully guying Monsignor Knox, the main character in her novel Brat Farrar (1949) was an impostor posing as a missing twin to grab an inheritance.
Her disdain for formulaic fiction is confirmed in the opening chapter of The Daughter of Time (1951). In a hospital recuperating from a broken leg, Detective Inspector Alan Grant despairs of the books on his bedside table, among them a writing-by-numbers mystery called The Case of the Missing Tin-Opener. “Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then?” he wonders despairingly.
Was everyone nowadays thirled [enslaved] to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about “a new Silas Weekley” or “a new Lavinia Fitch” exactly as they talked about “a new brick” or “a new hairbrush.” They never said “a new book by” whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.
Still true today (are you listening, James Patterson and Lee Child?), but this is not a charge that could ever be made against Josephine Tey. In The Franchise Affair (1948) she can’t even be bothered to include the obligatory murder: all we have is a teenage girl who claims that two women kidnapped her for no apparent reason, and we know almost from the outset that she is lying.
The Daughter of Time exemplifies Tey’s delight in subverting the conventions of the genre and defying expectations. Giving up on his bedside reading, Alan Grant decides to spend his convalescence solving one of the most notorious crimes in British history: did King Richard III really kill the princes in the Tower? Grant’s interest is piqued when a visitor shows him a portrait of the 15th-century king. After staring at it for ages—“the slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face”—he reaches a preliminary verdict. “I can’t remember any murderer, either in my own experience, or in case-histories, who resembled him.” So the bed-ridden sleuthing begins.
It was William Shakespeare whose depiction of Richard III as a venomous hunchbacked monster damned him for centuries, and it was Shakespeare who, in Macbeth, had King Duncan say of the duplicitous Thane of Cawdor, “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face: / He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust”—by which he meant that no one can discern inner character from outward appearances.
Josephine Tey thought otherwise. “Lucy had long prided herself on her analysis of facial characteristics, and was beginning nowadays to bet rather heavily on them,” she wrote in Miss Pym Disposes (1946). “She had never, for instance, come across eyebrows beginning low over the nose and ending high up at the outer end, without finding that their owner had a scheming, conniving, mind.” Even chickens weren’t safe from Tey’s stern gaze: one of her characters mused on “the concentrated evil of a hen’s face in a closeup.”
This may seem a bit intense for a whodunit, and almost certainly falls foul of the ban on intuition, but it imbues Tey’s novels with more honesty than you’ll find in most of her contemporaries: which of us does not sometimes judge by appearances? ‘I am a camera” might have been Josephine Tey’s motto. “Oh, for one of those spy cameras that one wears as a tie pin!” she wrote in a letter to her friend Caroline Ramsden, a sculptor and racehorse owner, according to Ramsden’s memoir, A View from Primrose Hill. “When I was in town this last time I thought that, apart from a well-fitting new suit, there was nothing in the world that I wanted. And then I thought that yes, there was. I wanted a camera that looked like a handbag, or a compact, or something. So that one could photograph a person standing two feet away and be looking in another direction altogether while one was doing it.... I am always seeing faces that I want to ‘keep.’ ”
Tey herself had no desire to be “kept.” Few photographs of her exist, and by dividing her life into discrete spheres she ensured that no one could know her too intimately. (One need hardly add that she never married.) To date, more than 60 years after her death—uniquely among the queens of the golden age—there is no biography (although one is due out in the fall). Oh, and her name wasn’t Josephine Tey. Her literary friends called her Gordon, but that wasn’t her name, either.
Before turning to crime she was the dramatist “Gordon Daviot,” author of Richard of Bordeaux, which played to packed houses at the New Theatre, in London’s West End. “I first met Gordon Daviot in 1932,” the actor John Gielgud wrote in 1953, “when I played the title role in Richard of Bordeaux. We were friends until her death last year—1952—and yet I cannot claim ever to have known her very intimately.... She never spoke to me of her youth or her ambitions. It was hard to draw her out.... It was difficult to tell what she really felt, since she did not readily give her confidence, even to her few intimate friends.”
This much we know. Elizabeth MacKintosh, pen name Josephine Tey, was born on July 25, 1896, in Inverness, capital of the Scottish Highlands. Her father was recorded on the birth certificate as a fruiterer. “Strange as it may seem, few of us had ever known the real person,” recalled Mairi MacDonald, a contemporary at Inverness Royal Academy. “We had rubbed shoulders with her in our busy streets; admired her pretty home and picturesque garden—and some had even shared schooldays with her—yet no one enjoyed her companionship, for Gordon Daviot was, and wished to be what she herself termed herself, ‘a lone wolf,’ discouraging any attempts at fraternisation.” A reluctant pupil, she preferred playing tic-tac-toe with a neighbor in class, or drawing mustaches and spectacles on portraits of the Kings of Scotland, or scampering off to a cloakroom “where, upon an old set of parallel bars—housed there for no apparent reason—she delighted herself and others by turning somersaults.”
The next phase of her life, qualifying as a physical-training instructor, provided the backdrop for Miss Pym Disposes, set at a physical-training college in the English Midlands. According to most sources, including an obituary in the London Times, her teaching career was curtailed by family obligations. After teaching physical training at schools in England and Scotland, she returned to Inverness to care for her invalid father. It was there that she began her career as a writer.
Nicola Upson, who investigated Tey’s life with the intention of writing a biography, finds the tale of the invalid father hard to credit, given that he was catching prizewinning salmon into his 80s. “A lot of myths and half-truths have been created and repeated over the years,” she wrote to me. “Admittedly, she started one or two of them herself.” Tey’s description of a film actress in A Shilling for Candles may well have been a self-portrait:
She wasn’t fond of being interviewed. And she used to tell a different story each time. When someone pointed out that that wasn’t what she had said last time, she said: “But that’s so dull! I’ve thought of a much better one.” No one ever knew where they were with her. Temperament, they called it, of course.
Nicola Upson eventually set aside her projected work, deciding that such an elusive figure was more suited to fiction. Her novel An Expert in Murder, published in 2008, was the first of a series in which Josephine Tey herself features as an amateur detective. Though the crimes are imaginary, the settings are accurate. We see her traveling to London to enjoy the success of Richard of Bordeaux—or, in another volume, meeting Alfred Hitchcock to discuss his film adaptation of her novel A Shilling for Candles. According to Upson, “Readers tell me that part of the fun of the books is guessing what’s true and what isn’t…. But the bigger picture of her that I’ve built up from her letters and from talking to people who knew her is reflected very truthfully throughout the series.”
Tey’s great genius, Upson says, is to create a story which can be read on many levels, and which differs according to its audience—a trick that Tey played with her life, too, and just as effectively. Elizabeth MacKintosh, Gordon Daviot, and Josephine Tey were distinct personae. Even her correspondence has that chameleon quality: a letter from “Gordon” is quite different in tone from a “Mac” letter or a “Tey” letter. “She kept her life in compartments,” says Upson, “and was different things to different people; private and insular in Inverness; carefree and more gregarious in London and on travels abroad.”
Gregarious only within a small circle, however: Mairi MacDonald found Tey’s unwillingness to meet strangers “almost pathological in its intensity.” Having decided to model Brat Farrar’s physical appearance on that of a well-known racehorse dealer, she asked her friend Caroline Ramsden to find out all she could about him. “It isn’t a question of wanting to meet him—which I should actively dislike,” she wrote to Ramsden. “It is a quite detached curiosity about him…. What he thinks, reads (I suppose he can?), says, eats; whether he likes his bacon frizzly or flaccid…. It always happens with someone I see casually, like that; and once my curiosity is satisfied my interest finishes. But until the picture is complete the curiosity is devouring.”
The devotion to her craft was absolute. While writing a novel she could allow no distractions, and it shows. The prose is nimble, acute, witty. The texture of English interwar life is palpable. Tey’s fictional worlds come fully furnished: even minor characters are never mere ciphers. Her regular detective, Alan Grant, has none of the eye-catching props—deerstalker hat, waxed mustache, monocle—that other authors append to fictional sleuths in lieu of a third dimension. He is dogged, diligent, ready to admit error. “By the time coffee had arrived he was no nearer a solution,” Tey writes in A Shilling for Candles. “He wished he was one of these marvelous creatures of super-instinct and infallible judgment who adorned the pages of detective stories, and not just a hard-working, well-meaning, ordinarily intelligent Detective Inspector.”
When Tey’s work was finished, she displayed an equally absolute devotion to indolence. “Next to chocolates, the cinema and racing, her favourite pastime was a day in bed, lying flat on her back, wide awake."
I realized five years ago I had made a note to seek out more information and the works of Josephine Tey, and all came together in one recent swoop. At the end of this well written biography, the author concludes that Elizabeth was devoted to her family, a good and loyal friend, but she did not want to be public property nor seek out social media. What a refreshing change from celebrities now. Overall, she created a successful and interesting life for a single woman.
At the end, the author writes, "Sometimes it is hard to realize that these lively young women and men are all dead and gone. Elizabeth MacKintosh was a daughter her parents could be proud of, a citizen that Inverness should revere. Ultimately, she was spiky, friendly, contradictory, intelligent, funny, inspiring, difficult and above all a writer that many readers simply love, without knowing anything about her at all."
Unlike Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey ignored the rules of golden-age British crime fiction—with brilliant results. But 60 years after her death, the greatest mystery Tey created still may be herself.
It begins with a body in the library. Two hundred pages later, when the police have exhausted all lines of inquiry and made hee-hawing jackasses of themselves, an amateur detective summons the dramatis personae to the same library—they may well include an actress, a tennis pro, an embittered widow, a disinherited younger son, and of course a butler—to reveal which of them is the killer.
That is the familiar template for crime fiction in the golden age, those years between the First and Second World Wars, when authors such as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers earned fortunes by satisfying an apparently limitless public appetite for corpses in English country houses. One of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels was actually titled The Body in the Library.
Christie and Sayers were founder-members of the Detection Club, a dining society formed in London in 1930. Recruits had to swear an initiation oath promising that their detectives “shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God.” A joke, no doubt, but this was kidding on the level. Like any game, mystery writing had its rules, which were codified into “Ten Commandments” by the British author Ronald Knox—who, fittingly enough, was also a Catholic priest. His prohibitions included accidental discoveries and unaccountable hunches, undeclared clues and hitherto unknown poisons.
“The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow,” Knox decreed. “The ‘stupid friend’ of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader…. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.”
No wonder Josephine Tey never belonged to the Detection Club. During her career as a crime novelist—from The Man in the Queue (1929) to The Singing Sands (published posthumously in 1952)—she broke almost all the commandments. As if willfully guying Monsignor Knox, the main character in her novel Brat Farrar (1949) was an impostor posing as a missing twin to grab an inheritance.
Her disdain for formulaic fiction is confirmed in the opening chapter of The Daughter of Time (1951). In a hospital recuperating from a broken leg, Detective Inspector Alan Grant despairs of the books on his bedside table, among them a writing-by-numbers mystery called The Case of the Missing Tin-Opener. “Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then?” he wonders despairingly.
Was everyone nowadays thirled [enslaved] to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about “a new Silas Weekley” or “a new Lavinia Fitch” exactly as they talked about “a new brick” or “a new hairbrush.” They never said “a new book by” whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.
Still true today (are you listening, James Patterson and Lee Child?), but this is not a charge that could ever be made against Josephine Tey. In The Franchise Affair (1948) she can’t even be bothered to include the obligatory murder: all we have is a teenage girl who claims that two women kidnapped her for no apparent reason, and we know almost from the outset that she is lying.
The Daughter of Time exemplifies Tey’s delight in subverting the conventions of the genre and defying expectations. Giving up on his bedside reading, Alan Grant decides to spend his convalescence solving one of the most notorious crimes in British history: did King Richard III really kill the princes in the Tower? Grant’s interest is piqued when a visitor shows him a portrait of the 15th-century king. After staring at it for ages—“the slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face”—he reaches a preliminary verdict. “I can’t remember any murderer, either in my own experience, or in case-histories, who resembled him.” So the bed-ridden sleuthing begins.
It was William Shakespeare whose depiction of Richard III as a venomous hunchbacked monster damned him for centuries, and it was Shakespeare who, in Macbeth, had King Duncan say of the duplicitous Thane of Cawdor, “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face: / He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust”—by which he meant that no one can discern inner character from outward appearances.
Josephine Tey thought otherwise. “Lucy had long prided herself on her analysis of facial characteristics, and was beginning nowadays to bet rather heavily on them,” she wrote in Miss Pym Disposes (1946). “She had never, for instance, come across eyebrows beginning low over the nose and ending high up at the outer end, without finding that their owner had a scheming, conniving, mind.” Even chickens weren’t safe from Tey’s stern gaze: one of her characters mused on “the concentrated evil of a hen’s face in a closeup.”
This may seem a bit intense for a whodunit, and almost certainly falls foul of the ban on intuition, but it imbues Tey’s novels with more honesty than you’ll find in most of her contemporaries: which of us does not sometimes judge by appearances? ‘I am a camera” might have been Josephine Tey’s motto. “Oh, for one of those spy cameras that one wears as a tie pin!” she wrote in a letter to her friend Caroline Ramsden, a sculptor and racehorse owner, according to Ramsden’s memoir, A View from Primrose Hill. “When I was in town this last time I thought that, apart from a well-fitting new suit, there was nothing in the world that I wanted. And then I thought that yes, there was. I wanted a camera that looked like a handbag, or a compact, or something. So that one could photograph a person standing two feet away and be looking in another direction altogether while one was doing it.... I am always seeing faces that I want to ‘keep.’ ”
Tey herself had no desire to be “kept.” Few photographs of her exist, and by dividing her life into discrete spheres she ensured that no one could know her too intimately. (One need hardly add that she never married.) To date, more than 60 years after her death—uniquely among the queens of the golden age—there is no biography (although one is due out in the fall). Oh, and her name wasn’t Josephine Tey. Her literary friends called her Gordon, but that wasn’t her name, either.
Before turning to crime she was the dramatist “Gordon Daviot,” author of Richard of Bordeaux, which played to packed houses at the New Theatre, in London’s West End. “I first met Gordon Daviot in 1932,” the actor John Gielgud wrote in 1953, “when I played the title role in Richard of Bordeaux. We were friends until her death last year—1952—and yet I cannot claim ever to have known her very intimately.... She never spoke to me of her youth or her ambitions. It was hard to draw her out.... It was difficult to tell what she really felt, since she did not readily give her confidence, even to her few intimate friends.”
This much we know. Elizabeth MacKintosh, pen name Josephine Tey, was born on July 25, 1896, in Inverness, capital of the Scottish Highlands. Her father was recorded on the birth certificate as a fruiterer. “Strange as it may seem, few of us had ever known the real person,” recalled Mairi MacDonald, a contemporary at Inverness Royal Academy. “We had rubbed shoulders with her in our busy streets; admired her pretty home and picturesque garden—and some had even shared schooldays with her—yet no one enjoyed her companionship, for Gordon Daviot was, and wished to be what she herself termed herself, ‘a lone wolf,’ discouraging any attempts at fraternisation.” A reluctant pupil, she preferred playing tic-tac-toe with a neighbor in class, or drawing mustaches and spectacles on portraits of the Kings of Scotland, or scampering off to a cloakroom “where, upon an old set of parallel bars—housed there for no apparent reason—she delighted herself and others by turning somersaults.”
The next phase of her life, qualifying as a physical-training instructor, provided the backdrop for Miss Pym Disposes, set at a physical-training college in the English Midlands. According to most sources, including an obituary in the London Times, her teaching career was curtailed by family obligations. After teaching physical training at schools in England and Scotland, she returned to Inverness to care for her invalid father. It was there that she began her career as a writer.
Nicola Upson, who investigated Tey’s life with the intention of writing a biography, finds the tale of the invalid father hard to credit, given that he was catching prizewinning salmon into his 80s. “A lot of myths and half-truths have been created and repeated over the years,” she wrote to me. “Admittedly, she started one or two of them herself.” Tey’s description of a film actress in A Shilling for Candles may well have been a self-portrait:
She wasn’t fond of being interviewed. And she used to tell a different story each time. When someone pointed out that that wasn’t what she had said last time, she said: “But that’s so dull! I’ve thought of a much better one.” No one ever knew where they were with her. Temperament, they called it, of course.
Nicola Upson eventually set aside her projected work, deciding that such an elusive figure was more suited to fiction. Her novel An Expert in Murder, published in 2008, was the first of a series in which Josephine Tey herself features as an amateur detective. Though the crimes are imaginary, the settings are accurate. We see her traveling to London to enjoy the success of Richard of Bordeaux—or, in another volume, meeting Alfred Hitchcock to discuss his film adaptation of her novel A Shilling for Candles. According to Upson, “Readers tell me that part of the fun of the books is guessing what’s true and what isn’t…. But the bigger picture of her that I’ve built up from her letters and from talking to people who knew her is reflected very truthfully throughout the series.”
Tey’s great genius, Upson says, is to create a story which can be read on many levels, and which differs according to its audience—a trick that Tey played with her life, too, and just as effectively. Elizabeth MacKintosh, Gordon Daviot, and Josephine Tey were distinct personae. Even her correspondence has that chameleon quality: a letter from “Gordon” is quite different in tone from a “Mac” letter or a “Tey” letter. “She kept her life in compartments,” says Upson, “and was different things to different people; private and insular in Inverness; carefree and more gregarious in London and on travels abroad.”
Gregarious only within a small circle, however: Mairi MacDonald found Tey’s unwillingness to meet strangers “almost pathological in its intensity.” Having decided to model Brat Farrar’s physical appearance on that of a well-known racehorse dealer, she asked her friend Caroline Ramsden to find out all she could about him. “It isn’t a question of wanting to meet him—which I should actively dislike,” she wrote to Ramsden. “It is a quite detached curiosity about him…. What he thinks, reads (I suppose he can?), says, eats; whether he likes his bacon frizzly or flaccid…. It always happens with someone I see casually, like that; and once my curiosity is satisfied my interest finishes. But until the picture is complete the curiosity is devouring.”
The devotion to her craft was absolute. While writing a novel she could allow no distractions, and it shows. The prose is nimble, acute, witty. The texture of English interwar life is palpable. Tey’s fictional worlds come fully furnished: even minor characters are never mere ciphers. Her regular detective, Alan Grant, has none of the eye-catching props—deerstalker hat, waxed mustache, monocle—that other authors append to fictional sleuths in lieu of a third dimension. He is dogged, diligent, ready to admit error. “By the time coffee had arrived he was no nearer a solution,” Tey writes in A Shilling for Candles. “He wished he was one of these marvelous creatures of super-instinct and infallible judgment who adorned the pages of detective stories, and not just a hard-working, well-meaning, ordinarily intelligent Detective Inspector.”
When Tey’s work was finished, she displayed an equally absolute devotion to indolence. “Next to chocolates, the cinema and racing, her favourite pastime was a day in bed, lying flat on her back, wide awake."
I realized five years ago I had made a note to seek out more information and the works of Josephine Tey, and all came together in one recent swoop. At the end of this well written biography, the author concludes that Elizabeth was devoted to her family, a good and loyal friend, but she did not want to be public property nor seek out social media. What a refreshing change from celebrities now. Overall, she created a successful and interesting life for a single woman.
At the end, the author writes, "Sometimes it is hard to realize that these lively young women and men are all dead and gone. Elizabeth MacKintosh was a daughter her parents could be proud of, a citizen that Inverness should revere. Ultimately, she was spiky, friendly, contradictory, intelligent, funny, inspiring, difficult and above all a writer that many readers simply love, without knowing anything about her at all."
August 2, 2020
I enjoyed reading this account of Josephine Tey's life. There were occasional instances of bad editing, and it was very subjective, but generally well researched with a nod to the opinions of those more critical of Tey's personality and attitudes. The comments about Neil Gunn I found one-sided and slightly hostile - he was a dearly loved adopted uncle of my husband, whose father is referenced in the footnotes as he wrote Gunn's life. I don't think Gunn had any problem with Tey, either as an author or a person, they just disagreed politically. We have some lovely stories about her in the family. Other than that, as I said, a very interesting read.
Janet Pick
Janet Pick
January 25, 2021
I'm finished and I think I deserve a medal for stamina.
The book was based on very thorough research and was packed with stuff I did not know about this author, so it was illuminating. But my oh my it was so repetitious. It could easily have been a third shorter. What a shame there was not effective editing of the book to remove the duplicated facts - sometimes three or four times in a chapter. This detracted so much from my enjoyment of the book.
The book was based on very thorough research and was packed with stuff I did not know about this author, so it was illuminating. But my oh my it was so repetitious. It could easily have been a third shorter. What a shame there was not effective editing of the book to remove the duplicated facts - sometimes three or four times in a chapter. This detracted so much from my enjoyment of the book.
June 24, 2022
I have read almost all of Tey's novels, and most of her plays, and enjoyed them -- the novels do not hold up very well for me now, I think, they are too enmeshed in the assumptions of their times, but they gave me a lot of pleasure in the moment and I was very curious to learn more about her life. Unfortunately, this biography just did not work for me; I read about 150 pages, and then skipped ahead to some chapters I was interested in and tried to read those, and eventually gave the whole thing up due to the poor quality of the writing. I don't usually rate books I don't really finish, but I spent enough time with this one it seems fair to me.
I do respect what Henderson did, and tried to do, in this work -- she clearly did a great deal of intense research, but the problem is that she doesn't know what to do other than to demonstrate that over and over again. Instead of telling a story of Tey's life, Henderson lays her research out on the page, whether or not any particular piece of information is really relevant to Tey's personality or choices or any of the other things I read a biography to find out about. For instance, when one of Tey's sisters is pregnant, Henderson spends several paragraphs talking about how another of Tey's sisters (Jean) reacted to it, how Jean has a sharp tongue, quoting a letter demonstrating said sharpness of tongue, and oh yes this is relevant to Tey because look, Tey wasn't the only person in the family who had "the sarcastic sense of humour that Beth sometimes surprised people with, and which delights Josephine Tey’s readers".
But -- who cares? I mean, I love lots of detail, but I want it to be in service to a story, I want it to be adding layers and texture and feeling to the picture of someone's life. I'm a reader of Josephine Tey, and I'm not sure I've been delighted by her sarcastic sense of humour, and if I have I'm not sure why I need an example of it from a sister she disliked to prove... what? Or show what? And in the end that's where this biography fell apart for me; Henderson knows a lot about this family and she's going to show me everything she knows, like a kid laying out all their Pokemon cards; there's no sense that the information is being curated or shaped in any way.
(And don't even get me started on Henderson's inability to meaningfully tackle the novels themselves -- anyone who can talk about the entire plot of To Love and Be Wise without understanding -- they're clearly not a close critical reader.)
[June 2022]
I do respect what Henderson did, and tried to do, in this work -- she clearly did a great deal of intense research, but the problem is that she doesn't know what to do other than to demonstrate that over and over again. Instead of telling a story of Tey's life, Henderson lays her research out on the page, whether or not any particular piece of information is really relevant to Tey's personality or choices or any of the other things I read a biography to find out about. For instance, when one of Tey's sisters is pregnant, Henderson spends several paragraphs talking about how another of Tey's sisters (Jean) reacted to it, how Jean has a sharp tongue, quoting a letter demonstrating said sharpness of tongue, and oh yes this is relevant to Tey because look, Tey wasn't the only person in the family who had "the sarcastic sense of humour that Beth sometimes surprised people with, and which delights Josephine Tey’s readers".
But -- who cares? I mean, I love lots of detail, but I want it to be in service to a story, I want it to be adding layers and texture and feeling to the picture of someone's life. I'm a reader of Josephine Tey, and I'm not sure I've been delighted by her sarcastic sense of humour, and if I have I'm not sure why I need an example of it from a sister she disliked to prove... what? Or show what? And in the end that's where this biography fell apart for me; Henderson knows a lot about this family and she's going to show me everything she knows, like a kid laying out all their Pokemon cards; there's no sense that the information is being curated or shaped in any way.
(And don't even get me started on Henderson's inability to meaningfully tackle the novels themselves -- anyone who can talk about the entire plot of To Love and Be Wise without understanding -- they're clearly not a close critical reader.)
[June 2022]
January 28, 2024
I think I'll just say here what I kept saying to myself while trying to plough through this word salad of a book:
I wish the author had done a course on how to research and write a biography.
Clearly, she hadn't a clue. And what on earth were her editors thinking?
She gives the subject four or five different names. She repeats herself endlessly. She carefully references irrelevancies and has no evidence for her numerous speculations.
Case in point -- an entire chapter in which the author carefully researches a chap called Hugh Patrick MacIntosh, and spins up a twee little story about their friendship and/or love affair (he could have been the love of her life, you know). We know all about Hugh by the end of it. She's done a mini biography of the man. But what evidence is there that Tey actually knew this bloke?
Well, he was a writer, he also lived in Inverness, and she quoted one of his poems in To Love and be Wise.
Oh, wow, I totally ship it, Morag.
I mean, to be fair, she probably knew him. But the love affair is just made up.
And I admit that I'd bought the biography largely because there is so much queer coded (and not so coded) stuff in Tey's novels, but that there was no particular sign that she was a lesbian. I've always wondered if she was perhaps asexual / aspec. But no -- we had to pull out all the stops to prove that of course she wasn't queer!
So frustrating.
This was so awfully written and so bizarrely put together that I found myself simply not trusting it after this point. I want a competent biographer to have another go. Even if it's a short book, because there wasn't much about her.
Hell, there's decent biographies of Saki, and his sister burned all his papers!
I wish the author had done a course on how to research and write a biography.
Clearly, she hadn't a clue. And what on earth were her editors thinking?
She gives the subject four or five different names. She repeats herself endlessly. She carefully references irrelevancies and has no evidence for her numerous speculations.
Case in point -- an entire chapter in which the author carefully researches a chap called Hugh Patrick MacIntosh, and spins up a twee little story about their friendship and/or love affair (he could have been the love of her life, you know). We know all about Hugh by the end of it. She's done a mini biography of the man. But what evidence is there that Tey actually knew this bloke?
Well, he was a writer, he also lived in Inverness, and she quoted one of his poems in To Love and be Wise.
Oh, wow, I totally ship it, Morag.
I mean, to be fair, she probably knew him. But the love affair is just made up.
And I admit that I'd bought the biography largely because there is so much queer coded (and not so coded) stuff in Tey's novels, but that there was no particular sign that she was a lesbian. I've always wondered if she was perhaps asexual / aspec. But no -- we had to pull out all the stops to prove that of course she wasn't queer!
So frustrating.
This was so awfully written and so bizarrely put together that I found myself simply not trusting it after this point. I want a competent biographer to have another go. Even if it's a short book, because there wasn't much about her.
Hell, there's decent biographies of Saki, and his sister burned all his papers!
October 22, 2021
As Gordon Daviot, Elizabeth Mackintosh was a successful playwright and friend of theatre luminaries. As Josephine Tey she was top of the second division of Golden Age crime writers. But she was a private person who spent most of her adult life in her home town of Inverness, caring for her widowed father; and, after a romance cut short by the first world war, there was no significant other in her life.
Not the most obvious subject for a spell-binding biography. Jennifer Morag Henderson's book is admirably thorough and detailed, dispelling several inaccuracies that have dogged previous accounts of her subject, but there's not a lot of incident or drama and so, unfortunately, it's quite heavy going.
Not the most obvious subject for a spell-binding biography. Jennifer Morag Henderson's book is admirably thorough and detailed, dispelling several inaccuracies that have dogged previous accounts of her subject, but there's not a lot of incident or drama and so, unfortunately, it's quite heavy going.
June 20, 2024
This is the definitive book on Josephine Tey and serves as the ultimate reference. The author does a thorough job with her research and provides the reader with a complete understanding of Tey’s life, from birth to death. The historical context of each phase of life is well represented and provides valuable insight into interpretation of big life events for Tey.
My main critique is centers around copy-editing. The author repeats herself over and over throughout the chapters, almost as if the chapters were written months apart and she did not refresh her memory on already covered material before launching on a new chapter. This pattern also showed up paragraph to paragraph, which made the flow of thought hard to follow.
Overall, a must-read for fans of Tey’s work.
My main critique is centers around copy-editing. The author repeats herself over and over throughout the chapters, almost as if the chapters were written months apart and she did not refresh her memory on already covered material before launching on a new chapter. This pattern also showed up paragraph to paragraph, which made the flow of thought hard to follow.
Overall, a must-read for fans of Tey’s work.
August 4, 2026
This is a great biography. The writing is a little stiff, but the subject is fascinating and the authenticity of the biographical information is impeccable. There is a lot to love here, history of England and Scotland, history of British theater, the war years, and analyses of many topics: Scottish and Gaelic revival, social classes in the theater audiences and in Scotland, great descriptions of clothes and plays and books. I loved it, but can’t give it 5 stars because the writing, as mentioned, is quite dry. But when the biographer is defending her subject, she is brilliant and comes alive.
August 14, 2020
A conventionally structured biography beginning with antecedents. I don't find this very gripping and would prefer something organised on themes in some way. It leads in this case to a certain amount of repetition in the ay of reminders. The author clearly has certain points to make an the book could have been organised along those lines. As 'Josephine They' seems to have been a very private person, there is not much evidence, it seems, to go on for her life to be revealed in any depth.
February 16, 2022
This excellent, thoroughly researched biography places the life of Josephine Tey in context. There was so much more to her than the mystery writer. Born Elizabeth MacKintosh in Inverness, she always published her works under pseudonyms, and used English publishers, despite being forced by circumstances to live in her native Inverness. Thus her life story is much more complcated — and more interesting. Highly recommended.
February 11, 2023
Excessively thorough biography that reads like a thesis. Author Jennifer Morag Henderson is not one of nature's natural writers but her research is awesome.
Considering how little was known about Tey, she has fallen over backwards to explain this shy but extremely successful author.
I particularly wanted some intimate details of how Tey lived her life and after 554 pages, I definitely have them! Useful book if you admire the creator of Inspector Alan Grant.
Considering how little was known about Tey, she has fallen over backwards to explain this shy but extremely successful author.
I particularly wanted some intimate details of how Tey lived her life and after 554 pages, I definitely have them! Useful book if you admire the creator of Inspector Alan Grant.
Read
June 28, 2026I was so ready to love this book, that it took me 500 pages to find out it was at least 300 pages too long. There is an enormous amount of research in this book, and as a report of that research it works. But Elizabeth Mackintosh alias Gordon Daviot alias Josephine Tey does not come to life. She was shy, curious, brilliant. She was a west-end playwright and took care of her father when her mother died young.
January 24, 2018
My first Tey book was the Franchise Affair, which I read as a teenager in a collection of Ten Great Mystery stories or some such. Later when looking for reading material it occurred to me to search for the writer to see if there was anything else of the same quality - and was extremely happy to discover a wealth of novels. For me there are a few that stand head and shoulders above the others....The Franchise Affair, Brat Farrar, Miss Pym Disposes, The Daughter of Time. But the others are enjoyable reads as well.
Recently I was pleased to find a mystery series set with Josephine Tey herself as a protagonist and I looked forward to seeing potential connections between the author and her novels. I was quite taken aback to discover Tey characterised as a lesbian. While artistic license about some things is allowed, I really don't feel someone's sexual practices are something that should be misrepresented. Allowing room for error on my own understanding of Tey's life (actually Elizabeth Mackintosh writing under a pseudonym), I thought I'd better read something substantial on her life.
It took me a little while to get into this work, as the opening section deals at quite some length with her family history - grandparents on both sides, parents, their siblings, etc. I feel that this information could have been condensed and further details contained in an appendix or something like that. Or perhaps a family tree would have been helpful - since many of the family members shared first names, it got confusing to remember who was who, and it didn't really seem to matter that much.
Once past that however, I really enjoyed learning more about Elizabeth Mackintosh, her early work published as Gordon Daviot, her devotion to her craft and how it fitted into her life, her later work and the factors in choosing to publish other work as Josephine Tey. She even had another play produced later in life under a third pseudonym, kept strictly secret for many years.
Among the actresses and other women working in the theatre with whom she remained friends from the time of her first play launch in London up until her death, some were indeed lesbians. However, any implication that she herself was inclined that way is decidedly negated in her tactful but extremely clear letter to one of these friends, turning down her amorous advances.
Elizabeth abandoned life in England and the pursuit of her teaching career on her mother's death, to keep house for her father. It was interesting to see how she didn't allow this change to her life prospects to hold her back from a writing career, as well as to see how despite living a busy life in Inverness she maintained friendships with her London theatrical set.
Recently I was pleased to find a mystery series set with Josephine Tey herself as a protagonist and I looked forward to seeing potential connections between the author and her novels. I was quite taken aback to discover Tey characterised as a lesbian. While artistic license about some things is allowed, I really don't feel someone's sexual practices are something that should be misrepresented. Allowing room for error on my own understanding of Tey's life (actually Elizabeth Mackintosh writing under a pseudonym), I thought I'd better read something substantial on her life.
It took me a little while to get into this work, as the opening section deals at quite some length with her family history - grandparents on both sides, parents, their siblings, etc. I feel that this information could have been condensed and further details contained in an appendix or something like that. Or perhaps a family tree would have been helpful - since many of the family members shared first names, it got confusing to remember who was who, and it didn't really seem to matter that much.
Once past that however, I really enjoyed learning more about Elizabeth Mackintosh, her early work published as Gordon Daviot, her devotion to her craft and how it fitted into her life, her later work and the factors in choosing to publish other work as Josephine Tey. She even had another play produced later in life under a third pseudonym, kept strictly secret for many years.
Among the actresses and other women working in the theatre with whom she remained friends from the time of her first play launch in London up until her death, some were indeed lesbians. However, any implication that she herself was inclined that way is decidedly negated in her tactful but extremely clear letter to one of these friends, turning down her amorous advances.
Elizabeth abandoned life in England and the pursuit of her teaching career on her mother's death, to keep house for her father. It was interesting to see how she didn't allow this change to her life prospects to hold her back from a writing career, as well as to see how despite living a busy life in Inverness she maintained friendships with her London theatrical set.
Read
July 31, 2020never ended up completing the book.
January 12, 2023
An amazing feat of padding out the little we know. Just couldn’t keep going beyond half way.
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