THE AUTHOR / 1877–1950
D. K.
Broster
Dorothy Kathleen Broster was an English novelist and short-story writer best remembered for Flight of the Heron, her sweeping historical novel of the Jacobite Rising of 1745.
01 / SCHOLAR & NURSE
Born near Liverpool in 1877, Broster studied Modern History at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, as part of a pioneering generation of women permitted to study at the university but not yet receive degrees. She later worked as a research assistant to the historian Charles Harding Firth, developing the scholarly discipline that would become a defining feature of her fiction. During the First World War, she nursed wounded soldiers in Britain and France before illness forced her to return home.
02 / LOCHABER, 1923
Broster had already published several novels when a five-week visit to Lochaber in 1923 transformed the direction of her writing. Although she arrived with no intention of writing about the Forty-Five, the Highland landscape captured her imagination. By the time she left, the story that would become Flight of the Heron had taken shape.
03 / THE TRILOGY
Published in 1925, Flight of the Heron follows the growing bond between Ewen Cameron, a fictional Highland chieftain committed to the Jacobite cause, and Keith Windham, an officer in the government army. Broster believed that “the clash of character” was more important than “the clash of swords”, and it is this human conflict that gives the novel its enduring emotional power.
04 / PRIVATE LIFE
Meticulously researched, Flight of the Heron became Broster’s greatest success. She continued the story in The Gleam in the North and The Dark Mile, forming what became known as the Jacobite Trilogy. Her knowledge of Highland history was so convincing — and her use of initials so ambiguous — that many readers assumed D. K. Broster was a Scottish man. In fact, she was a deeply private Englishwoman who lived for more than thirty years with her close companion, Gertrude Schlich, in Sussex.
05 / A LASTING NOVEL
A century after its first publication, Flight of the Heron remains a compelling story of divided loyalties, political conflict and the unlikely human connections that can survive even the violence of war.
Discover the story behind Flight of the Heron
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