Scotch Verdict with Lillian Faderman

Join Lavender Menace for a conversation with Lillian Faderman about the writing of her acclaimed book Scotch Verdict. First published in 1983, the book details the experience of uncovering the story of a scandal surrounding a 19th-century boarding school in Edinburgh’s New Town.

This online event will be held on Zoom. We'll email attendees a Zoom link before the event.

About Scotch Verdict

In 1810, a Scottish student named Jane Cumming accused her schoolmistresses, Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods, of having an affair in the presence of their students. Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, the wealthy and powerful grandmother of the accusing student, advised her friends to remove their daughters from the Drumsheugh boarding school. Within days, the institution was deserted and the two women were deprived of their livelihoods.

Award-winning author Lillian Faderman recreates the events surrounding this notorious case, which became the basis for Lillian Hellman's famous play, The Children's Hour. Reconstructing the libel suit filed by Pirie and Woods—which resulted in a scotch verdict, or a verdict of inconclusive/not proven—Faderman builds a compelling narrative from court transcripts, judges' notes, witnesses' contradictory testimony, and the prejudices of the men presiding over the case. Her fascinating portrait documents the social, economic, and sexual pressures shaping the lives of nineteenth-century women and the issues of class and gender contributing to their marginalisation.

About the speaker

Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of lesbian and LGBT history and literature. She is professor emerita of English at California State University, Fresno. Her award-winning titles include: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Surpassing the Love of Men, Naked in the Promised Land, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians.

The event will be chaired by Indigo Dunphy-Smith

Indigo Dunphy-Smith (she/her) is a researcher and writer based in Edinburgh. She specialises in research and public programmes that create space for marginalised stories in traditional spaces. She is the author of How to: Queer Your Historic House, a practical toolkit for uncovering queer stories in museum collections, and co-chairs the National Trust for Scotland’s LGBTQ network and supports organisations to queer their heritage spaces.

Image credits

Lilian Faderman photo by Phyllis Irwin; map reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland Map Images website.