It was strange, it was alarming, to feel, as by this time he did, how strongly their intimacy had progressed in two months of absence and, on his side, of deliberate abstention from communication – like the roots of two trees growing secretly towards each other in darkness.

A Jacobite Trilogy (1984) (incorporating The Flight of the Heron, The Gleam in the North and The Dark Mile) Set in Scotland in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, this is the story of an unlikely friendship between Keith Windham, a career soldier in the British Army, and a young Highland chieftain who follows Bonnie Prince Charlie in his bid for the throne.Epic period drama made by Scottish Television and based on D.K. Broster's 1925 novel centred round fictional events at the time of the non-fictional Jacobite Rebellion of 1746 and leading up to the battle of Culloden. Broster also wrote several short horror stories, collected in "A Fire of Driftwood" and Couching at the Door. The title story of "Couching at the Door" involves an artist haunted by a mysterious entity. Other supernatural tales include "Clairvoyance", (1932) about a psychic girl, "Juggernaut" (1935) about a haunted chair, and "The Pestering", (1932) focusing on a couple tormented by supernatural entity. Set during the 1745 Jacobite uprising under Bonnie Prince Charlie, The Flight of the Heron is the first of the Jacobite Trilogy. Their fates are linked inextricably when a highland prophecy tells Ewen that the flight of a heron will predict five meetings with an Englishman who will cause him much harm but also render a great service. Ewen is sceptical, but the prophecy proves true when he meets Englishman Keith Windham - and a gripping tale of adventure, danger and true and lasting friendship is set into motion.

Wallace, Diana (2005). The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.33–34. ISBN 1403903220. I was given this book as a present nearly forty years ago. Struggled as a child (just preteen) to read it, but held on - it had reputation for being good. The title comes from the fact that a seer predicts that Cameron will meet Windham five times by water, each time signaled by the flight of a heron. Broster served as secretary to Charles Harding Firth, ( Regius Professor of History from 1904 to 1925) for several years, and collaborated on several of his works. Her first two novels were co-written with a college friend, Gertrude Winifred Taylor: Chantemerle: A Romance of the Vendean War (1911) and The Vision Splendid (1913) (about the Tractarian Movement). [4] The story can be read as straight romance, gay romance, or a superbly researched historical adventure. The author was a secretary at an Oxford College, and had previously been a nurse in France during the First World War, and one can assume that she knew exactly what she was writing about in all respects. And she did the job brilliantly; the book's funny and moving by turns, and though the ending is sad, it's also absolutely epic and stays in the mind for a long, long time.During the First World War she served as a Red Cross nurse with a voluntary Franco-American hospital, but she returned to England with a knee infection in 1916. After the war, she and a friend, Gertrude Schlich (daughter of Wilhelm Philipp Daniel Schlich, first professor of forestry at Oxford), moved near to Battle, East Sussex, where Broster worked full-time as a writer. She was in the first batch of women to receive her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in 1920 at Oxford. [5] This is my favourite type of historical fiction, fictional characters at centre stage moving within an authentically described historical environment while historical characters play their known parts at the edges. Descriptions of the Scottish countryside are breathtaking, catching both the beauty and the majesty of the scenery. The Flight of the Heron was published in 1925 so is now almost one hundred years old and, in many ways, it is a book of its time. The language is formal and properly punctuated. There are smatterings of Gaelic, some untranslated, and the speech of characters with accents are rendered phonetically, and while this slows reading down, it is understandable (nothing like Joseph in Wuthering Heights). This is not a book to be rushed through, it is a story to be savoured. It says something that a book can enthrall a starry-eyed girl of twelve and a man of around forty belonging to that generation who experienced both the struggles of economic depression and war. And re-reading, all these decades on, The Flight of the Heron still holds its special place for me.

I enjoyed the writing itself as well and the characters' longing for various things and I feel like the highlands in particular were granted a kind of otherworldiness but in a good way. a b Diana Wallace, The Woman's Historical Novel: British women writers, 1900–2000. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 1-4039-0322-0, pp. 7 and 29. The novel was adapted for the stage in 1997 by Turtle Key Arts; the production featured traditional Gaelic songs and new music composed by Stephen Nash. [13] External Links [ edit ] The book is dedicated to Violet Jacob, whose Flemington - which covers much the same ground as this - and Tales of Angus I read in 2015. Broster is not as good a stylist as Jacob was, though. Indeed, her prose tends to the utilitarian, but she does have an eye for landscape.Major Keith Windham is a career soldier with the English Army - seemingly the antithesis of Ewen. He is jaded, worldly and loyal to the Crown but, ultimately, an outsider. You're really going to let your foster-brother run off and get shot? Really? Because he killed Windham and you knew why he did largely do to a misunderstanding and you're still like I never forgive you? Your chokehold loyalty has very strange conditions.

The storyline was not what I expected. This is not really a historical novel in the true sense. It focuses on relationships, particularly the growing friendship between the hero, Ewan Cameron, and an English officer, Keith Windham, as each man realises that the other, nominally an enemy, is in fact a man of great integrity, honesty and dignity. Broster’s previous novels were largely set during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, but she was inspired to write about the ’45 during a visit to the Scottish Highlands. She wrote that ‘the spirit of the place got such a hold upon me that before I left I had the whole story planned almost in spite of myself.’ [1] I'm fairly sure Broster knew what she was doing. She certainly doesn't take it to the sexual, but there is intimacy galore. Other, earlier books of hers (Mr. Rowl, The Wounded Name, even to some extent the religious novel she co-wrote, The Vision Splendid) have similar pre-slash - or, if you prefer, romantic friendship - elements. But this is the one that is most perfectly conceived, and when I scribble, I still find myself unconsciously imitating moments from "The Flight of the Heron."

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Broster, D. K. (February 1929). Whitney, Eleanor (ed.). "Heroism in Lost Causes—The Work of D. K. Broster". The Horn Book Magazine. Boston, Massachusetts: Women’s Educational and Industrial Union . Retrieved 2 April 2023. Period drama serial The Flight of the Heron was based on a 1925 novel by D.K. Broster, aka Dorothy Kathleen Broster. It’s setting was the Jacobite Rebellion of the 1740’s and the Battle of Culloden (the same real life time period as the first couple of seasons of Outlander). Ewen Cameron and Keith Windham are soldiers on opposing sides but eventually come to a respect for one another. Just after Bonnie Prince Charlie has landed in Scotland, Windham is captured by Cameron (due to no fault of his own - his horse shying at a heron rising in front of it, which only slightly injures him but breaks the horse’s leg - leaving him all but defenceless.) Windham is surprised to find Cameron not the barbarian of his expectations but a gentleman with fine and chivalrous manners. Having given his parole, Windham is indebted to Cameron for intervening when on a stroll he comes across locals retrieving their arms cache from the thatched roofs of their houses and is thereby thought to be a spy. In the meantime, we find that Cameron’s foster-father - who is a seer - has predicted that Cameron and Windham will meet a total of five times, leaving the reader totting up their encounters. Sure enough the pairs’ paths cross again in Edinburgh after the Battle of Prestonpans when Windham has sallied from the castle in an attempt to capture the Prince - to whom Cameron is now aide-de-camp – who is visiting a house nearby, and once again Windham finds himself indebted to Cameron for allowing him to escape the clutches of Highlander reinforcements.