Marjory Fleming's precocity is apparent in her inconsequential (to the adult mind) yoking of juvenile and maturer topics, and in her appetite for books (she records enjoying the poems of Pope and Gray, the Arabian Nights, Ann Radcliffe's ' misteris of udolpho', the Newgate calendar, and ' tails' by Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More). Stevenson and Algernon Swinburne and a surprisingly hagiographic essay by the usually unsentimental Mark Twain attest. Brown's full transcript of the journals eventually formed the basis of Lachlan Macbean's edition of 1904, and it was Brown's fictitious account of the Scott– Marjory connection, a distasteful mixture of gush and coquetry, that authorized Leslie Stephen's Dictionary of National Biography entry of 1889 (in which he misnames her Margaret), and which fuelled the general turn-of-the-century fascination with Marjory, as references to her by R. With no substantial evidence, Brown spun an account of a friendship between Marjory and the adult Walter Scott.
The extracts were extended and the portrait further heightened by John Brown, reviewing Farnie in 1863. Farnie, who published in 1858 sentimentally embellished portions from them, coined the name Pet Marjorie, and began the mawkish Victorian construction of the child genius. Almost fifty years after Marjory's death the journals, preserved by her sister Elizabeth Fleming, came to the attention of H. A jumbled and colourful mix of copybook moralisms (extending to observations on sexuality, sin, and her own bad temper), childish enthusiasms about favourite animals and dolls, and quirkily humorous exercises in poetry, they were supervised and their wilder misspellings corrected by her cousin Isa. Marjory Fleming's reputation as a child prodigy is based upon three manuscript journals, probably written between April 1810 and April 1811, in Edinburgh and on holidays at nearby Ravelston, the Keith family seat. In July 1811 Marjory returned to her family home in Kirkcaldy, where she died on 19 December, just a month short of her ninth birthday, probably of meningitis following on from measles. Here she remained for three years, until the summer of 1811, under the irregular tutelage of her much loved teenage cousin Isabella (Isa) Keith.
In summer 1808, aged five, Marjory paid an extended visit to her Keith relatives at 1 North Charlotte Street, Edinburgh. Her mother was distantly connected to Walter Scott through her sister Marianne Rae who married William Keith, first cousin to Anne Rutherford, Scott's mother. c.1840), accountant and magistrate, and Isabella Rae ( d. Trustees of the National Library of Scotlandįleming, Marjory ( 1803–1811), child diarist, was born on 15 January 1803 in Kirkcaldy, Fife, the third child of James Fleming ( d.
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