Mitchell Library

Love Letters to A Murder: The Mythology of Madeleine Smith

Love Letters to A Murder: The Mythology of Madeleine Smith
Tickets
Free - ticket required
Box office telephone
Dates and times
Saturday 18th Oct 2025
3:00pm
Age
Adult

The love letters which Madeleine Smith wrote to Emile L'Angelier during their clandestine affair of 1855-57 were essentially a work of Victorian fiction. That is not to say they were fabrications of letters. But they were performances by a young woman keen to take on a variety of roles, and roles that were often largely in response to a man's coercive behaviour. Madeleine Smith's letters were clothes she could put on or take off, and did not necessarily show what she truly felt or thought.

How then is a novelist writing about Smith's relationship to read those letters? Do they ever give us glimpses of the real woman beneath the performance? And how do they support the contention that Madeleine was responsible for the death of Emile from arsenic poisoning in March of 1857? 

Join Kirsten McQuarrie and Lesley McDowell to ponder this, and hear about Madeleine Smith's extraordinary story as portrayed in McDowell's historical novel, Love and Other Poisons (Wildfire).

A collection of Madeleine's letters held in the Mitchell Library, will be on display.

Lesley McDowell's first novel, The Picnic, was published by Black and White in 2007, and her second – Unfashioned Creatures - about Mary Shelley’s Scottish childhood friend, was published by Saraband in 2013. In 2010, she published a literary biography of the relationships nine women writers had with their male counterparts, Between the Sheets, which was reviewed widely, including by the New York Times Book Review, The New RepublicThe Sunday Times and The Financial Times. It was shortlisted in the ‘non-fiction’ category for Scottish Book of the Year, 2011. Her novel, Clairmont, is the spellbinding, bold new retelling of the story of Lord Byron and the Shelleys, from the perspective of Claire Clairmont, the incredible woman that history tried to forget.

Kirsten MacQuarrie’s debut novel Remember the Rowan, inspired by the true story of the 'some-requited' love between poet Dr Kathleen Raine and author-naturalist Gavin Maxwell, was a finalist in The People's Book Prize and longlisted for The Highland Book Prize. A chartered librarian, Kirsten is twice winner of the Glasgow Women's Library Bold Types poetry prize and the editor of Feminist Librarianship (Facet, 2026).

Please call 0141 287 2988 or email specialcollections@glasgowlife.org.uk to book a space.

 

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This accessible toilet is approximately 26m (28yd 1ft) from the main entrance. This accessible toilet is located to the rear right as you enter.

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