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Love Letters To A Murder – The Mythology of Madeleine Smith

Saturday 18th October, 2025, 3:00pm

The Mitchell Library, North Street, Glasgow G3 7DN

Kirsten MacQuarrie and Lesley McDowell

The love letters which Madeleine Smith wrote to Emile L’Angelier during their clandestine affair of 1855-57 were essentially a work of Victorian fiction. That is not to say they were fabrications of letters. But they were performances by a young woman keen to take on a variety of roles, and roles that were often largely in response to a man’s coercive behaviour. Madeleine Smith’s letters were clothes she could put on or take off, and did not necessarily show what she truly felt or thought.

How then is a novelist writing about Smith’s relationship to read those letters? Do they ever give us glimpses of the real woman beneath the performance? And how do they support the contention that Madeleine was responsible for the death of Emile from arsenic poisoning in March of 1857?

Join Kirsten McQuarrie and Lesley McDowell to ponder these questions, and hear about Madeleine Smith’s extraordinary story as portrayed in McDowell’s historical novel, Love and Other Poisons (Wildfire).

Lesley McDowell

A collection of Madeleine’s letters held in the Mitchell Library, will be on display.

Lesley McDowell’s first novel, The Picnic, was published by Black and White in 2007, and her second – Unfashioned Creatures – about Mary Shelley’s Scottish childhood friend, was published by Saraband in 2013. In 2010, she published a literary biography of the relationships nine women writers had with their male counterparts, Between the Sheets, which was reviewed widely, including by the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Sunday Times and The Financial Times. It was shortlisted in the ‘non-fiction’ category for Scottish Book of the Year, 2011. Her novel, Clairmont, is the spellbinding, bold new retelling of the story of Lord Byron and the Shelleys, from the perspective of Claire Clairmont, the incredible woman that history tried to forget.

Kirsten MacQuarrie

Kirsten MacQuarrie’s debut novel Remember the Rowan, inspired by the true story of the ‘some-requited’ love between poet Dr Kathleen Raine and author-naturalist Gavin Maxwell, was a finalist in The People’s Book Prize and longlisted for The Highland Book Prize. A chartered librarian, Kirsten is twice winner of the Glasgow Women’s Library Bold Types poetry prize and the editor of Feminist Librarianship (Facet, 2026).

Book a place

Please call 0141 287 2988 or email specialcollections@glasgowlife.org.uk to book a space.

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