From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides: An Autobiography - Softcover

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9780862414863: From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides: An Autobiography

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0862414865 ISBN 13: 9780862414863

Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd, 1994

Margaret Fay Shaw's life has spanned a century of change. Today she is lucid, eccentric and an inspiration to others. This autobiography, accompanied by photographs, traces the author's life from America in 1906 to the Isle of Canna today. Born in America early this century, Margaret Fay Shaw was witness to a way of life now unrecognizable. Orphaned in her early teens, she was despatched to a distant cousin near Glasgow for her schooling. It was there that her love for Scotland was born. After studying music in New York in the 1920s, she returned to Scotland. For six years she lived with two weavers in a "black house" on South Uist, a small island in the Outer Hebrides then largely untouched by the changes of civilization. In 1938, Margaret married the renowned Gaelic scholar and author, John Lorne Campbell. Soon after, they bought the island of Canna where they have lived ever since.

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About the Author:

Margaret Fay Shaw died on Canna in 2004 at the age of 101. She was one of the most notable collectors of authentic Scottish Gaelic song and traditions in the 20th century. Shaw was also an outstanding photographer, and both her still pictures and cinematography contributed to an invaluable archive of island life in the 1930s. She met the folklorist John Lorne Campbell on South Uist in 1934; they married a year later and together helped to rescue vast quantities of oral tradition from oblivion. Her autobiography has been almost continuously in print since its first publication in 1994.

Review:

'This autobiography is a miniature masterpiece. It is direct, straightforward, often funny, sometimes moving, never sentimental, always serving to evoke what was so valuable about ways of living, which in the last half century, have been set irretrievably aside.' - Times Literary Supplement

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