Mary Charlotte Julia Gordon

Mary Charlotte Julia Gordon became Mary Charlotte Julia Leith (1840–1926), she was best known as Mrs Disney Leith who was a British novelist and traveller. She was a childhood friend of Swinburne and after her husband died she visited Iceland numerous times, writing about the country and translating works from Icelandic. Life Leith was born Mary Charlotte Julia Gordon, in London, and she was the daughter of Mary Agnes Blanche (born Ashburnham) and Sir Henry Percy Gordon bart in 1840. Her father had been a leading mathematician when he was at Cambridge. Her grandfathers were General Sir James Willoughby Gordon and George Ashburnham, the Earl of Ashburnham. She was brought up in the family seat of Northcourt House at Shorwell on the Isle of Wight. Northcourt House was a mansion that stood inside its own park. Her first cousin was the poet Swinburne lived nearby on the Isle of Wight. He was frail but "fired with nervous energy and fearlessness to the point of being reckless." They went riding and they wrote Jacobean plays together in the library at Northcourt. She was educated at home; she mastered several languages in addition to ancient Greek and Latin. She learned mathematics and was a talented pianist and organist. She and Swinburne secretly collaborated on her second book, "Children of the Chapel", which was about a ten year old chorister in the 16th century. It an unusual amount of beatings. The co-authorship was not revealled until after Swinburne had died. On 14 July 1865 she married the first commander of the 106th Regiment of Foot of the Bombay Light Infantry. Colonel Robert William Disney Leith (later General) had lost an arm, gained a bullet and several sabre cuts during the Siege of Multan in 1849. The coded correspondence between herself and Swinburne ceased until after her husband died.