The lives and works of Iona McGregor, Edinburgh lesbian novelist by Sigrid Nielsen

It’s evening in Edinburgh on 17 November 1860. As darkness falls, events are taking place all over the foggy, smoky, crowded city.

In the Royal Mile, former Police Inspector James McLevy, is walking his dog, Jenny, named for one of the city’s most notorious thieves. He’s wondering whether life will be dull in his retirement.

Up the hill at Waverley Station, a huge crowd has gathered. Eugenie, Empress of the French, is about to arrive – it’s the first time a French ruler has visited Scotland in centuries. Heavily veiled, the Empress alights from her carriage and acknowledges her admirers. But she barely escapes from a demonstration to seek refuge in her hotel in St Andrew Square.

The Empress is planning to visit a new girls’ school, the Scottish Institute for the Education of Daughters of Gentlefolk in Moray Place. Its scheming headmistress, Lady Superintendent Margaret Napier, is making entries in her Black Book. On the upper floors, student Christabel MacKenzie is writing a sonnet about the woman she loves – her teacher, Eleanor.

This is the opening sequence of Iona McGregor’s 1989 novel, Death Wore A Diadem. It was published by The Women’s Press and launched at West & Wilde, Edinburgh’s lesbian and gay community bookshop – in Dundas Street, not far from the locations where most of the novel takes place.

This photo of Iona in 2005 was taken by Phil Ewe and appeared in Rainbow City, published by Lighthouse. 

Death Wore A Diadem was described at the time as a lesbian mystery (Iona herself referred to it as a lesbian novel). And yes, there’s a theft and a mysterious death. The Empress lends the school her fabulous paste diadem – but it goes missing, a servant is found dead, scandal threatens and Christabel and Eleanor’s romance develops as they work to solve the mystery.

But there’s more to the story. It has a huge cast suggesting a light opera – from the Empress to the real-life detective and crime writer McLevy to a Rose Street landlady who lets rooms by the hour. Detailed Edinburgh history and lesbian history collide.

Death Wore A Diadem was also something else as well – the fulfilment of Iona’s longterm dream. Perhaps it was something she had hoped to do for most of her life.

Born in 1929 in Aldershot, Iona always said she would have been born in Scotland except for the fact that her birth was premature. She described her childhood in 1993 in Bob Cant’s Footsteps and Witnesses: Lesbian and Gay Lifestories from Scotland. The daughter of a teacher in a military school, she had a rough and physically active childhood with his male pupils for friends. A great reader, she had a difficult time at her convent school when she argued with the nuns about evolution, but won a scholarship to a school in Monmouth where she discovered the classics. She spent the summers with her grandmother in St Andrews, a place she loved.

When she began to write in the mid-60s, St Andrews figured in her first young adult historical novel, The Popinjay, the story of a teenage boy marooned in the city during the Wars of Religion. ‘A notable story…the living sense of the time is brought home with intense reality,’ said one reviewer.

The Popinjay was followed in 1968 by An Edinburgh Reel, a more complex work set in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1745. Christine, the heroine, is 15 when the story opens. Her father, a veteran of Culloden who fought on the losing side and has spent years in exile, returns to Edinburgh a changed man – destitute and suffering from what would today be called post-traumatic stress.

Christine herself is still living with the effects of civil war and the early death of her mother. She and her father find lodgings in a Lawnmarket stair, called Davidson’s Land in the story. Despite more difficulties they are gradually healed – through Christine’s growing strength and the support of a collection of neighbours and strangers.

An Edinburgh Reel received a glowing review in the Times Literary Supplement – ‘a wholly delightful creation,’ their reviewer said. A friend of Iona’s who was worked in children’s publishing a few years later says Iona was well thought of and read at book fairs and children’s events. Later, in 1986, Canongate Books republished it in their Kelpies series.

Iona published another novel set in Fife ten years after An Edinburgh Reel, The Burning Hill. It was substantially based, not on secondary sources, but on memoirs of the time.

In 1972 she published The Tree of Liberty, a young adult novel about Edinburgh at the time of the French Revolution. Her hero, Sandy Lindsay, becomes drawn into radicalism through his friendship with Geordie, a politically active odd-job man who works for his father. He takes part in a riot and is imprisoned, but unrepentant.

Some of the story may reflect changes in Iona’s life as the 1970s progressed. She had begun to work as a volunteer at the Edinburgh Gay Centre in Broughton Street and in Glasgow, organising meeting places and offering support to other LGBT people. Though this sounds like ordinary voluntary work today, it was extremely risky at the time. LGBT people’s jobs and family relationships were at serious risk if they came out and many lived double lives divided by high barriers.

Iona told Bob Cant in her interview in Footsteps and Witnesses that she knew as early as age eight that she was ‘different’. She was strongly attracted to some of her fellow students at her girls’ school – and one of the best things about the classics, she added elsewhere, was ‘Sappho et cetera’, almost the only mention of queer people she could find. 

When she started her working life in the 1950s she found that LGBT people were extremely isolated in Edinburgh, and so she went to London, found a teaching job, and met the woman she called her ‘true love’. They moved to Edinburgh together, but both were teachers and the stress of keeping their relationship absolutely secret became unbearable for Iona’s partner, who left her after 12 years.

Iona’s new career as a lesbian activist may have been the result of her breakup and the secret life she was forced to lead. But it was even more of a threat to her job than her relationship had been. At first she used an assumed name,  but as time went on she welcomed visitors to the gay centre, using her own name, week after week. Another friend remembered her taking part in demonstrations.

Asked if there were any LGBT characters in her young adult novels, she said that the publisher had made it clear that even hints of LGBT feelings were out of the question. Did she ever break the rule? Perhaps, just perhaps, with Sandy and Geordie, she thought.

But she was already have been hoping to write openly and honestly about the lives she imagined for Edinburgh queer folk. And by the beginning of the 1980s, publishing had changed – and there were companies which would give her book a home, not grudgingly, but proudly.

Iona found a sympathetic editor at The Women’s Press, a feminist publisher which welcomed lesbian manuscripts. (The growth of LGBT and feminist presses also made it possible to open Edinburgh’s lesbian and gay bookshop, Lavender Menace, which later became West & Wilde.)

Rosy Mack, PhD student from the University of Texas, recently researched Iona’s correspondence with her Women’s Press editor, Jan Green. Ironically, Iona was more forthcoming about her lesbian identity than about her writing – it was a very private matter for her. Her letters offer some of the only insights we have into her approach to writing, research, and lesbian characters.

In her conversations with Jen Green, Iona meticulously mapped the movements of her characters in the fictional Scottish Institute. She also considered their lives as lesbians carefully – she argued that she did not want to write a novel about fear and inner angst – she felt that Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness had set an unfortunate tone for grim lesbian ‘problem’ fiction. Christabel and Eleanor, no matter what other problems they might have, belonged to an earlier, less dangerous era when even Queen Victoria believed that lesbians did not exist.

The novel may have been the first story of lesbian characters set in Edinburgh. It seems clearly aimed at a sequel, or a series. Christabel and Eleanor are young and their relationship is just beginning: a new theme comes up when Eleanor is accepted for training in the US as one of the first women doctors, while Christabel wants to entice her to Paris.

But the sequel was never written – possibly an opportunity for lovers of lesbian and Edinburgh stories of the future.

Iona continued to live her many lives as a writer, a traveller, a learner, a teacher (she taught for University of the Third Age), a cat lover and a friend. She lived to be 92 and died, sadly missed by her friends and readers, in March last year.

Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive want to celebrate her life for LGBT History Month and highlight her role in the history of Edinburgh.
Come to our live illustrated talk and workshop at Currie Library at 7pm on 18 February.
Book your free ticket via Eventbrite

Or join us online at our Conversations with Writers event, hosted by LGBT Health and Wellbeing, at 7pm on 25 February.
Book for this free event via Eventbrite

As a teacher, an activist, and a writer who made the past lives of Scottish and LGBT people real, Iona surely ranks as one of Edinburgh’s notable women and I will be nominating her at the International Women’s Day Panel at Central Library on 8 March. (More details about this exciting event to come soon).

Many thanks to Sigrid Nielsen for contributing today’s article. Sigrid, together with Bob Orr, set up Lavender Menace, Scotland’s first lesbian and gay bookshop in Forth Street in 1982 and which would become the West & Wilde bookshop.