Marie Clothilde Balfour

Balfour was born in Edinburgh, the daughter of James Balfour, a noted engineer, and Christina Simson Balfour (later Nicholson). Writer Robert Louis Stevenson was her first cousin. She spent her early years in New Zealand while her father was working there; when he died in 1869, she returned to Scotland with her mother.^[1]

Balfour wrote three novels, translated a French Revolution-era memoir, and edited two volumes of letters from her aunt, Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson, sent during her travels with her son in Polynesia.^[2][3] She also wrote plays and stories, and collected folklore from Northumberland and Lincolnshire.^[4] "From time to time doubts have been expressed about the authenticity of the tales that Marie Clothilde Balfour said she had collected," notes one scholar,^[5] because the tales she published were especially strange, and she certainly added her own literary flourishes.^[6][7][8]

• "Legends of the Lincolnshire Cars" (Folk-Lore, Vol. II, 1891, a series of articles)^[9][10][11]
• White Sand (1896, novel)^[12]
• Maris Stella (1896, novel)^[13]
• "Sub Tegmine Fagi" (The Yellow Book, Volume X, July 1896, short story)^[14]
• The Fall of the Sparrow (1897, novel)^[15]
• "Saint Joseph and Mary, from a French folk song" (The Yellow Book, Volume XII, January 1897, poem translated by Balfour)^[16]
• From Saranac to the Marquesas and beyond; being letters written by Mrs. M. I. Stevenson during 1887–88, to her sister, Jane Whyte Balfour (1903, edited by Balfour)^[17]
• Examples of printed folk-lore concerning Northumberland (1904, collected folksongs)^[18]
• Memoirs of Mlle des Écherolles, being sidelights on the Reign of Terror (1904, translated by Balfour)^[19]
• Mrs. M. I. Stevenson, Letters from Samoa, 1891–1895 (1906, edited by Balfour)^[20]

Balfour married her first cousin, physician James Craig Balfour; they had a daughter, Marie Margaret Melville Balfour, who also became a writer.^[21] Balfour's husband died in 1907, and she died in London in 1931.^[1]