Catherine Helen Spence was born in 1825, the fifth of eight children of two Scots – Helen Brodie and David Spence. She accounted herself well-born for, she said, ‘my father and mother loved each other’. She considered herself well-descended, ‘going back for many generations on both sides of intelligent and respectable people’. This was a clear statement of a conviction that she began to reach in her 20s and held firmly by the time she was in her 80s – that sincere affection, intelligence and respectability counted for far more in individual happiness and social harmony than birth, wealth or even piety. But she was not as wholly unworldly as those statements in the opening paragraph of the autobiography that she wrote in her 80s would suggest. She also quoted her father saying that ‘he was sprung from the tail of the gentry’, while her mother ‘was descended from the head of the commonalty’.

Her mother, Helen Brodie, was descended from a long line of East Lothian tenant farmers who had, she boasted, ‘always been at the head of their class’. To maintain such a position during the enclosures and onslaught on small holdings of the 18th century, a tenant farmer must have been ready to adopt new agricultural methods and implements.