from Jill 01/12/2014

On Wednesday, November 12th,  several of us gathered at Margaret’s house in Ariccia to meet Julie Davidson, the author of “Looking for Mrs Livingstone”,  which most of us had thoroughly enjoyed reading in October/ November.  Margaret had actually kept pretty quiet about the fact that Julie was in fact an old friend dating back to their early days as journalism students in Scotland; and it only emerged after we had discussed the book with enthusiasm that they knew each other well and she could probably persuade Julia to come down to Rome to meet with us while she was in Italy.

Julie was able to tell us a little more about the background to her research, confirming that it was suspected that the family had destroyed most, if not all, of Mary Livingstone’s correspondence from which we would have learnt so much more.  She had wondered herself about the insertion of her travels and research into the main story about Mary’s life, but although some of us had felt a little confused during the reading and wondered even if the accounts of her travels were not a little intrusive, we mostly agreed with Julie that they were relevant and even brought home to us the sadness and pathos of the  few traces of evidence which she managed to find.

Julie’s working life has been devoted to freelance journalism,  mainly as a travel correspondent with various newspapers and magazines, and she explained the mechanics of finding a publisher and making sure that she was assured of publication before she started.  She mentioned that she has already started work on her next book which will deal with various women who had some connection with David Livingstone during his life, amongst them Mary Moffat,  David’s mother-in-law.