Guest of Honour - Diana Gabaldon
- Roddy Martine
- January 13 2025
The Spring Banquet welcomed best-selling novelist Diana Gabaldon. Roddy Martine looks at her life.
FOR devotees of Diana Gabaldon’s best-selling Outlander novels, and the subsequent STARZ television drama series, it would seem perfectly believable for her fictitious hero Jamie Fraser, and heroine, the ‘Sassenach’ Claire, to turn up at Blair Castle for a Keepers of the Quaich banquet.
Indeed, Sam Heughan, who plays the strapping Jacobite hero Jamie, has already done so at the Autumn Banquet of 2019, and been welcomed into the Society. After all, the Outlander books are essentially all about time travel and not least, the importance of uisge beatha.
To have written 10 international best sellers (the latest is as yet untitled) set in a country the author had never previously visited is in itself a remarkable achievement. Needless to say, Diana has since become a regular visitor and is a familiar face at Scottish book festivals.
Born and brought up in Flagstaff, Arizona, Diana Gabaldon’s world and that of Scotland in the 18th century could not have been more different. However, it was while watching television at home in the USA and seeing a man wearing a kilt in a re-run of an early episode of the BBC’s science fiction series Dr Who that inspired her.
“I thought it quite fetching!” she said as a deliberate understatement.
Diana’s father Tony Gabaldon was an American State Senator. Today, she still lives in Arizona with her husband Doug Watkins with whom she has three adult children. Her ancestry, she explains, is part English and part Mexican-American, her father’s family having been “just there when Mexico became part of the USA”.
She has a degree in Zoology, a Masters in Marine Biology and a PhD in Behavioural Ecology, but her career as a novelist took off almost by accident in the 1980s.
“I wanted to learn what it took to write a novel and to find out if I really wanted to,” she said.
She did. The man in the kilt started her off and as a research processor who knew her way around libraries, she set about reading every available book she could find on Scotland. That was in March 1988 in an almost unimaginable era before the internet existed.
Diana’s first Outlander book was published in 1991, and she has since written 10 more. In 2013, STARZ, the American premium cable and satellite television network, commissioned 16 episodes of an adaptation starring Sam Heughan as the Jacobite hero Jamie Fraser and Catriona Balfe as his English love interest Claire Randal. The Outlander series has since run to eight seasons. More than 50 million copies of the books have been sold around the world and they have been translated into 39 languages.
Combining heated sexual conflict, with sensitively observed emotions experienced three centuries apart, and addressing contemporary themes such as the nature of war, Diana knew from the start she was on to a winner. “I was looking for a way to make money in the second oldest profession,” she observed coquettishly. “My husband said to me that if I hadn’t been born with a conscience and a sense of empathy, I’d be a very dangerous person!”
Fortunately, Scotland in the 20th and 21st centuries is a very accessible country for a writer in search of its history and traditions, and there was a wealth of information to be found on the subject.
For example, Craigh na Dunn where the story begins. “I had to get a feel of the place and the people who lived there,” she reflected. “I was intrigued about standing stones and I began speculating about their possible uses. After everything that has been written about them, nobody actually knows what they are there for, so it seemed perfectly acceptable for them to be portals to another time.”
After her first three days of basic research, Diana decided to introduce an English woman and to put her in a room full of Scotsmen to see what they would do. “It was all Claire’s fault,” she laughed. “From that moment on she took over as the voice of their story.”
And from that moment on Diana’s (or should one say Claire’s) gripping, often fantastical and sometimes mildly shocking story lines have transported Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp Randall Fraser, her handsome plaid-wrapped 18th century red haired paramour Jamie Fraser, Claire’s long suffering 20th century husband Frank Randall, and Brianna, Claire’s daughter by Jamie, back and forth with dazzling dexterity between the Highlands of Scotland, the France of Louis XV, the West Indies, and revolutionary America.
From book one to the most recently published Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone, the average pagination runs to 822 pages. Each volume has its own compelling ‘cliff hanger’ conclusion, cleverly enticing the reader to want more or to go right back to the beginning.
“I wanted to create nice big books for readers to take on long journeys to places like Cleveland,” she quips. Those familiar with Cleveland will understand what she is saying.
Astonishingly prolific, Diana has also written a string of novellas and a sequence of shorter works centred on Lord John Grey, a recurring secondary character from the Outlander novels.
In 2010, a 14-song cycle based on Outlander was composed and recorded on CD but is yet to appear on stage.
Along with the popularity of the novels, the television series has come as a blessing to Scottish tourism, reflecting the ever-changing landscape of mists and golden sunshine and the noble, often blood-soaked historic fortresses of the past. For example, Muiravon Country Park at Linlithgow became the backdrop for the Battle of Prestonpans in 1745. Fifty years ago, Doune Castle in Stirlingshire, the property of our Society Patron The Duke of Fife, was the setting for the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Henceforth, it became Castle Leoch, the fictitious home of Clan Mackenzie. Falkland Palace in the Kingdom of Fife, Preston Mill in East Lothian, the bleak horizons of Culloden Moor, and the thatched quirkiness of the Highland Folk Museum at Newtonmore all feature in the narrative.
At South Queensferry, Hopetoun House, with its wings removed, was the setting for the Duke of Sandringham’s country house, as in reality it is the home of our very own Society Patron the Earl of Hopetoun. Here, the Sea Trail and West Lawn to the rear of the house witnessed the dual between the Duke, played by the actor Simon Callow, and the head of the McDonald Clan. Also on the Hopetoun Estate is Midhope Castle which doubles as Lallybroch, Jamie Fraser’s childhood home.
Deanston Distillery in Perthshire features as a wine warehouse at the docks in Le Havre. The glorious interiors of the Signet Library in Edinburgh were transformed into the Governor’s mansion in Jamaica. Newhailes House, east of Edinburgh, serves as Governor Tryon’s North Carolina home in the USA, and the gardens of Gosford House in East Lothian and Drummond Castle in Perthshire feature as those of the Palace of Versailles in France. To this end, VisitScotland now publishes a best-selling Outlander tour map.
Diana is a perfectionist and, to add factual authenticity, she explains she was given invaluable help by native Gaelic speaker Ian MacKinnon Taylor who contacted her and hesitantly asked if she had been getting her Gaelic from a dictionary? Thereafter, the Gaelic singer Catherine Ann MacPhee has been among her several advisors on 18th century Highland life.
In 2023, Diana was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Glasgow University and she was invited to open the first International Outlander Conference. “I have occasionally been asked if I don’t feel I am committing cultural appropriation by using Scottish history as a background for my novels,” she confessed.
“To which I reply that I actually think the Scots have appropriated me, which is very nice of them.”
And so we have.
This article first appeared in the summer 2024 issue of The Keeper
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