This biography, written by Sandra Cairncross, has been republished with permission from the Dangerous Women Project, created by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Born: 1832, United Kingdom
Died: 1907
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Mary Hean
Hearing about the Dangerous Women Project and reading its blogs got me thinking about the women in my family tree, great grandmothers and aunts, close and distant cousins, whose lives were often less recorded and hence less remembered than their fathers, brothers and husbands. However, as I researched and delved further into their lives, I began to realise than many of my ancestors were indeed Dangerous Women; who lived their own lives and in so doing both shaped and were shaped by their wider families and surroundings.
One such women was Mary Hean (1832 to 1907), a distant cousin, born into a well-off Dundee family of builders. Mary married a solicitor David Alexander in 1861 at the relatively late age of 29. Their marriage certificate describes Mary as “living with her parents”. However in the census earlier that year she is described as a wine and spirit merchant, suggesting more than element of “dangerousness” in that family circumstances meant that she could have followed a more conventional path of being supported solely by her father and thence her husband.
Mary and David moved from Dundee and set up home in Glasgow, where they had five daughters, the Alexander sisters:
Elizabeth Helen Alexander 1862 to 1951
Mary Hean Alexander 1863 to 1951
Catherine Hutton Alexander 1865 to 1866
Helen Alexander 1868 to 1942 (also known as Ella Hean)
Lily Alexander 1869-1961