This biography, written by Sandra Cairncross, has been republished with permission from the Dangerous Women Project, created by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Born: 1863, United Kingdom
Died: 1951
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
Hearing about the Dangerous Women Project and reading its blogs got me thinking about the women in my family tree, great grandmothers and aunts, close and distant cousins, whose lives were often less recorded and hence less remembered than their fathers, brothers and husbands. However, as I researched and delved further into their lives, I began to realise than many of my ancestors were indeed Dangerous Women; who lived their own lives and in so doing both shaped and were shaped by their wider families and surroundings.
One such women was Mary Hean (1832 to 1907), a distant cousin, born into a well-off Dundee family of builders. Mary married a solicitor David Alexander in 1861 at the relatively late age of 29. Their marriage certificate describes Mary as “living with her parents”. However in the census earlier that year she is described as a wine and spirit merchant, suggesting more than element of “dangerousness” in that family circumstances meant that she could have followed a more conventional path of being supported solely by her father and thence her husband.
Mary and David moved from Dundee and set up home in Glasgow, where they had five daughters, the Alexander sisters:
Elizabeth Helen Alexander 1862 to 1951
Mary Hean Alexander 1863 to 1951
Catherine Hutton Alexander 1865 to 1866
Helen Alexander 1868 to 1942 (also known as Ella Hean)
Lily Alexander 1869-1961
At first, the lives of the sisters seemed enigmatic, leaving little trace to be found in census records –rarely did the family appear together. For example, the 1881 census sees David with his two youngest daughters in Glasgow, along with a cook and a table-maid, but there is no sign of Mary and the two eldest daughters. The 1891 census sees the parents together with Elizabeth and Helen, but not Lily and Mary. Death certificates yield relatively little information – those of Elizabeth, Mary and Lily simply state that they were single and suggest that the sisters had lived together. Initially, Helen’s couldn’t be found.
Finding out more about the sisters initially proved elusive. However perseverance paid off: combining names and addresses in Google brought up an article from the Glasgow Herald: “Miss Lily Alexander: An Appreciation” which was published following her death.
The author (only their initials DA are given) starts by reflecting that the death of Lily marks “the end of an era, an era associated with gracious hospitality, with philanthropy untinged by patronage, and with an appreciation of the fine arts”. It goes on to say that Lily was the “youngest of four brilliant sisters” adding that “all four were educated abroad at a time when Swiss and Paris finishing schools were unheard of”. This probably explains the gaps in the census records. The sisters lived together in Queens Crescent and “held on Sunday afternoons what was probably the city’s nearest approach to French salons” and that “visitors there were Glasgow’s most distinguished men and women, mingled with a scattering of foreign scholars, shy young students and budding musicians to whom the sisters wished to give a helping hand”.
The article paints a vivid picture of each of the sisters and their accomplishments – Elizabeth was an Oriental scholar and had received an honorary degree from Glasgow University. Ella (as Helen came to called herself in later years) was a sculptor “whose work was well known in art circles”. Mary was a pianist who “given better health, would have made her name on the concert platform”. Lily herself served in a canteen in Abbeville France during the First World War and afterwards went to Canada where she travelled extensively on her own.
I was intrigued and I set to find out more. I found no further references to Mary, save that she died four days before her sister Elizabeth.