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Mrs. (Ethel) Alec-Tweedie

London, 1862 - 1940, London

BiographyTweedie [née Harley], Ethel Brilliana [known as Mrs Alec Tweedie] (1862–1940), travel writer, was born at 77 Harley Street, London, on 1 June 1862, the daughter of George Harley (1829–1896), physician, and Emma Jessie, daughter of James Muspratt, a wealthy alkaline manufacturer. They had at least three children. Her family background was one of ‘luxury and joy’ (Tweedie, 1) coloured by her father's national and international scientific contacts and the wealth of her mother's family. She was educated at Queen's College, London, and in Germany, where her father had earlier worked and studied. On 1 January 1887 she married Alexander Leslie (Alec) Tweedie (1849/50–1896), a marine insurance broker at Lloyd's, son of Alexander George Tweedie of the Madras civil service and grandson of Alexander Tweedie, physician, and entered a life of ‘still more luxury and gaiety’ (Tweedie, 1). This sheltered and happy life came to an end abruptly with a series of tragic events. Her husband lost all his money when his syndicate failed; his losses turned him from a cheerful outgoing man to a cheerless one and, according to his wife, were what killed him when he died shortly thereafter, in the early summer of 1896. She and their sons Leslie and Harley were left with no settlement, and their predicament worsened later in 1896 when her father died, also leaving her without a settlement.

Determined to bring up her sons well, even before her father's death Mrs Tweedie capitalized on her enjoyment of travel and turned to travel writing to make her living; she found a receptive public which had a taste for travel books but not yet the opportunity for travel itself. A Girl's Ride in Iceland (1889) was, as she explained with a mixture of pride and apology, a ride ‘man fashion’. That trip set the pattern of travel followed by book—in this case perhaps her least affected book, with an appendix on geysers by her father. The visit to Iceland was followed by A Winter Jaunt to Norway (1894) and, perhaps her most memorable journey, Through Finland in Carts (1897). She then went further afield, to Sicily, Mexico, the USA, Russia, and China, and the resultant travel books, unaccountably to the late twentieth-century reader, were often popular enough to go to several cheap editions and to be translated into other languages. She dabbled in biography as well, starting by editing her father's memoirs for publication in 1899. Tragically both her sons were killed in the First World War. This removed one of the main reasons for her writing, but by then she saw herself as a professional writer and continued to turn out volumes. Her books were always rather ‘anxious’ to inform and ‘heavily overweighted’ with advice to women and girls (Middleton, 5, 9), and later on ‘the melodramatic quality of her travel writing began to smack of bathos and it was only Ethel's unerring sense of admiration for herself that saved her from literary ridicule’ (Robinson, 199). There can certainly be no regrets for the passing into obscurity of Busy Days: Quotations from the Author's Works for Every Day of the Year (1913), Women the World Over: a Sketch both Light and Gay, perchance both Dull and Stupid (1914), and My Table-Cloths (1916), or Mainly East (in Prose—perhaps Prosey) (1922): but much of her relentless jolliness can probably be traced to her need to please. Certainly she could not afford to abandon a proven formula. She also sketched what she saw on her travels and exhibited her watercolours in several public and private galleries, mainly in London but also in Paris. Often known in mid- to later life as Mrs Alec-Tweedie, she served on numerous philanthropic and charitable committees, seeing herself increasingly as an arbiter of taste and conduct. She was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She died on 15 April 1940 at her home at 60 Devonshire House, Mayfair, London. She was one of the first professional travel writers and was remarkably successful, accumulating an estate proved at just under £20,000, and though her writing now seems unattractive she claimed to have been the first woman to accomplish many feats, from riding astride to skiing.

Elizabeth Baigent
Sources

E. B. Tweedie, Me and mine (1933) · WWW · D. Middleton, Victorian lady travellers (1965) · J. Robinson, ed., Wayward women: a guide to women travellers (1990) · M. Morris, The Virago book of women travellers (1994) · J. Robinson, Unsuitable for ladies (1994) · census returns, 1891 · b. cert. · m. cert. · d. cert.
Likenesses

J. Lavery, photogravure, 1903 (after oil painting), repro. in P. Bate, Modern Scottish painters (1903) [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in A. Tweedie [E. B. Tweedie], ‘A leap of a hundred and twenty feet’, World Wide Magazine, 1 (1898), 572
Wealth at death

£19,895 13s. 1d.: probate, 24 May 1940, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Tweedie , Ethel Brilliana (1862–1940)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/45559, accessed 6 Aug 2013]

Ethel Brilliana Tweedie (1862–1940): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/45559

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Last Updated8/7/24

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