Her face looks out from the background of the portrait: high cheekbones, dark eyes, a sardonic turn to the chin. She wears an elaborately embroidered black doublet-type garment with exaggerated shoulders, holds a book and a quill in long fingers braceleted with ruffs at the wrist. Gold writing over her left shoulder reads ‘Scottis Sapho Saige 1586, Marie Maitland’. It is a portrait of a 16th-century woman who knows what she wants, looking without embarrassment out at the viewer. 

The portrait, painted by Mike Foster in 2021 as part of a Scottish National Portrait Gallery exhibition of ‘James’s People’, is the pictorial equivalent of Douglas’s biography With my Own Hand. Both Foster and Douglas imagine Marie Maitland as an intelligent and independent Scottish woman writer living in the second half of the 16th century, intercutting the political turmoil of the reign of the other Mary, Queen of Scots, with a more recognisably modern sensibility. Marie emerges as witty, self-assured, financially independent; in the painting, the book she is carrying resembles a 21st-century journal more than the antique manuscripts with which she is usually associated. 

This chimes with the great strength of Douglas’s book: the urgency of its parallels between our own day and Marie’s. From archival traces of Marie, Douglas has created an attractive but anachronistic pioneering feminist, lesbian and role model. Recalling her own adolescence, she notes that ‘learning about someone like Marie