Fiona part 1
Fiona seems like a very old name, but it鈥檚 not. That鈥檚 not the only surprise about Fiona.
A lot of people assume that Fiona is a very old Scottish name, but the first known Scottish Fiona is from the 1890s: Fiona Macleod, the enormously popular novelist of Scotland's Celtic Revival movement. But when she suddenly stopped writing in 1905... there turned out to be far more surprises about Fiona Macleod than the novelty of her name. Writer and performer Harry Josie Giles and PhD researcher Moll Callaway-Heaton consider the first Scottish Fiona.
This is part one of a pair of episodes about the name Fiona; part two will explore the etymology of the name and similar ones in various languages, and examine the first appearance of Fiona in literature, which comes with its own cocktail of complication.
Harry Josie Giles is a writer and performer whose verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia just won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year!
Moll Heaton-Callaway is a scholar of book history and gender identity and has written a PhD thesis about Fiona Macleod and William Sharp.
Thanks to Anne Pond from the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall for information about the boat(s) named Fiona.
This episode was produced by Helen Zaltzman, with editorial assistance from Martin Austwick who also composed the music.
