Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Parcel of Rogues – guest post by Olga Wojtas

Posted on July 1, 2026

Now that I’m the author of several novels and novellas, among them bestsellers and prize nominees, I feel I can safely disclose that a German publisher turned down my first book with the immortal words: “This is too zany for the Germans.”

I fear my writing may be too zany for a lot of people: my heroine is Shona Aurora McMonagle, a fifty-something librarian from Edinburgh’s Morningside Library, who is sent on time-travelling missions by Miss Marcia Blaine, the founder of the school she attended. Miss Blaine appears to be a woman in her prime, although she must be several hundred years old. Shona, who has had the finest education in the world at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, nonetheless never quite grasps what her mission is, and the alert reader is likely to have worked out what’s going on long before she does.

Little surprise that my Amazon reviews range from “deliciously ridiculous” all the way to “I wanted to slap her”.

Fortunately, no one has slapped me, and I’ve just completed the sixth book in the “Miss Blaine’s Prefect” series. It struck me that while we knew a lot about Shona, Miss Blaine was quite a shadowy character. What was her back story? Where and when did she come from? She’s a thoroughly Edinburgh lady, deeply cultured and intellectual. So I reckoned she had to be a product of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18^th century, when Scotland led the world with an extraordinary flowering of philosophical and scientific achievement.

In the past, virtually all the characters in my novels have been fictional, although I’ve occasionally enlisted real people, such as Debussy, opera singer Mary Garden, Macbeth and his beloved non-murderous wife Gruoch. But this book was the other way round; virtually all the people in it are real. The Edinburgh of the time was known as “a hotbed of genius” and it certainly included a hotbed of unforgettable characters, including Robert Burns, Walter Scott, publisher and bookseller William Creech, and poet, wit and hostess Alison Cockburn. No point in reinventing the wheel by making up characters when they were there ready-made.

I admit to gaily mixing up fact and fiction in my books and this time I didn’t have far to look for facts that were an absolute gift to a fiction writer. Here are bits I honestly haven’t made up.

Robert Burns did have an accident getting out of a coach, badly injuring his leg, although the jury’s out as to whether it was the coachman’s fault or whether Burns was a wee bit unsteady following the consumption of strong drink.

It’s true that he was due to meet socialite and estranged wife Mrs Agnes McLehose the day after the accident, but while he was laid up in bed, he began a romantic correspondence with her, in which they called themselves Sylvander and Clarinda.

It’s true that Walter Scott, a shy teenager, met Robert Burns at a dinner party and turned into a total fanboy.

It’s true that Edinburgh’s James Tytler was the first person in Britain to fly in a hot-air balloon, even though he generally crash-landed. When he wasn’t ballooning, he edited the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, expanding it from three volumes to ten.

It’s true that Lord Braxfield, the Lord Justice Clerk, was a very nasty man who insisted on speaking in a thick Scottish accent and enjoyed sentencing people to death. He told one prisoner: “Ye’re a verra clever chiel, man, but ye wad be nane the waur o a hanging” – “You’re a very clever fellow, but you would be none the worse for being hanged.”

It’s absolutely true that the judge Lord Monboddo believed we were all born with tails, and that there was a conspiracy between mothers and midwives to dock the tails when babies were born.

And it’s true that pineapples were extremely expensive. And very probably true that people who couldn’t afford one would hire them from fruiterers as a swanky centrepiece for dinner parties.

Shona lands in the middle of this remarkable society on what is undoubtedly her most crucial mission to date. Will she succeed, despite being as clueless as ever? You’ll just have to read the book to find out.

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