The Times

“To any of us brought up on The Skye Boat Song — “Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing” — Flora Macdonald will always be a legend. Her bravery in ferrying the handsome Bonnie Prince Charlie, the “Young Pretender” to the throne, from the Hebridean island of Benbecula “over the sea to Skye” in 1746, is one of the great historical tales of our childhoods, burnished in HE Marshall’s retelling in Our Island Story. “She served him when he was most miserable and in greatest danger.” She risked capture by the British forces loyal to the Hanoverian king and the death penalty in service of the Jacobite cause.

Macdonald was a legend in her own lifetime. On their tour to the Hebrides 27 years later in 1773, Dr Samuel Johnson and James Boswell visited the illustrious heroine in Skye to pay homage to her.

That Macdonald then sailed over the sea to North Carolina is less well-known. It was while flicking through a sheaf of portraits of famous figures involved in the American War of Independence that the historian Flora Fraser chanced upon an image of Macdonald. “What,” Fraser wondered, “had she, a Jacobite heroine of 1746, to do with these patriots across the Atlantic in the 1770s?” In this enthralling book, which throws us straight into the fresh air, heather, rain and midges of the Hebrides, followed by the swamps and creeks of North America, Fraser fleshes out what for most of us is a sketchy and romanticised area of our general knowledge.”

Review of Pretty Young Rebel – Ysenda Maxtone Graham, The Times, 2 September 2022