Ethel Brilliana Tweedie FRGS (1862–1940) was a prolific English author, travel writer, biographer, historian, editor, journalist, photographer and illustrator. She wrote as Mrs. Alec Tweedie, Mrs. Alec-Tweedie and as Ethel B. Harley.
Early life
Ethel Tweedie was born 1 January 1862 in London, the daughter of George Harley F.R.S. and Emma Jessie (Muspratt) Harley, into an early life of wealth and privilege. Her siblings included a sister (Olga) and three brothers (Edward Vaughan Berkeley Harley, Vernon De V. and Harold S.), She was named by her father for a famous relative, Lady Brilliana Harley (wife of Sir Robert Harley of Brampton Bryan). She was educated at Queen's College, London, and abroad in Germany.
In 1886 she visited Iceland on holiday with her brother Vaughan B. Harley, her future husband Alexander (Alec) Leslie Tweedie, a woman friend, and one other man. At the suggestion of her father, she kept a journal of her travels and published it afterwards as her first book, A Girl's Ride in Iceland in 1895 (even including an appendix on Icelandic geysers by her father). She married Alexander Tweedie two years later on 1 January 1887.
In 1893, following a telegram warning of the sudden serious illness of her brother Vaughan in Christiania, Norway she and her sister traveled to see him. She returned to Norway again within two years, then later published her second book A Winter Jaunt to Norway: with Accounts of Nansen, Ibsen, Bjornson, Brandes, and Many Others outlining her travel experiences and meetings with a number of famous people while abroad. Then, tragically, her whole life changed in the early summer of 1896 with the sudden death of her husband. She never remarried.
In 1897, still upset and stunned by his death, she agreed to accompany her sister and a Finnish companion, Frau von Lilly, on a trip abroad to Finland. During that time she gathered material that eventually made its way into a third book, Through Finland in Carts , published later in 1898 and beginning her career as a popular writer.
Author, photographer, painter, philanthropist
Tweedie's extensive bibliography spans the years from 1889 to 1936. Though she may be best known as a travel writer today, her works also include a biography of her father (George Harley, F.R.S. The Life of a London Physician), some works that are essentially a layperson's studies in early 20th century ethnography :Cremation the World Around and America As I Saw It; or, America Revisited,. A great number of her short works were written and published in the London popular press. After 1912 her works became more autobiographical.
She was a photographer, a prolific painter and a watercolorist; her published works included her own sketches and paintings, many made during challenging and dangerous travels. Shortly after the Armistice of 11 November 1918 she began an extended tour of the Near East in November 1919 (described in her work Mainly East), returning in the spring of 1921. She visited a number of countries, including France, Spain, Greece, Italy, Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, India, and Southern Sudan in central Africa. Returning from that two-year journey she exhibited three hundred watercolor sketches in July 1921 in London at the Alpine Gallery on Conduit Street / Bond Street and continued with other exhibitions and one-woman shows over the following years. A year before her death in 1940 she presented over five hundred sketches to various foreign governments, institutions, the Navy League, the Royal Empire Society and the Royal Central Asian Society.
Tweedie was an early and enthusiastic advocate of women's rights and women's suffrage. She was astute and flexible in adapting the practical habits of others she met in her travels. When traveling in Iceland in 1886, rather than riding sidesaddle she quickly adapted the Icelandic women's habit of riding astride a horse or pony as a sensible necessity—radical behavior for a British woman of her era. She wrote, "Necessity gives courage in emergencies. I determined therefore to throw aside conventionality, and do in 'Iceland as the Icelanders do.' ... Society is a hard task-master. Nothing is easier than to stick on a side-saddle, of course, and nothing more difficult than to ride gracefully. For comfort and safety, I say ride like a man."