Prisoner Of St Kilda

So began the stormy marriage between Lord and Lady Grange, a marriage which was to end with Lady Grange's death on the Isle of Skye after 13 years in exile. One shotgun wedding. Two Kings. Thirteen years incarcerated. You may be sure I have much more to tell. - Lady Grange, letter from St Kilda, 1738. Married to a Scottish law lord, Lady Grange threatened to expose her husband's secret connections to the Jacobites in an attempt to force him to leave his London mistress. But the stakes were higher than she could ever have imagined. Her husband's poweful co-conspirators exacted a ruthless revenge. She was forcibly removed from her Edinburgh lodgings and carried off to the Western Isles, doomed to thirteen bitter years of captivity. Death was her only release. Who kidnapped Lady Grange? How could this prominent member of Edinburgh society simply vanish? Why did no one try to find her until nine years after her abduction? Based on contemporary documents and Lady Grange's own letters, The Prisoner of St Kilda looks beyond the legends to tell for the first time the true story of an extraordinary woman. The true story of this lady is as frightfully romantic as if it had been the fiction of a gloomy fancy. - James Boswell, 1785 In the 18th century shotgun weddings were not unusual, but in most cases it wasn't the bride that was holding the gun. So began the stormy marriage between Lord and Lady Grange, a marriage which was to end with Lady Grange's death on the Isle of Skye after 13 years in exile. The daughter of a convicted murderer, Lady Grange's behaviour, such as her fondness for drink, was so outrageous that her sudden disappearance from public life was not considered surprising. But few knew the true story of her disappearance. This book reveals, for the first time, how the unfortunate lady was violently kidnapped and transported to the remote islands off the west coast of Scotland, spending seven years on the island of St. Kilda's. Condemned to a very different lifestyle than she had enjoyed in Edinburgh, and baffled by the strange tongue of the Gaelic West, she still obstinately survived, finally dying in Skye in 1745.