Barbara Elrington Douglas Arbuthnott was a Scottish woman who lived in Sunndal, Norway where she engaged in charitable work and wrote about her life.
Background
Douglas was born into a wealthy Scottish family in Templemore, Ireland. Her father, Sir Neil Douglas, Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, KCH (dies 1853) was a Scottish officer and Lieutenant General in the British army. Her mother was the daughter of a wealthy banker in Edinburgh.
On her father’s travels in the East she learned to speak Hindi.
Education
In her youth, she studied the Greek, Latin and German languages in Brussels (1831–1840).
Career
She met Queen Victoria in 1842. After her son’s death she bought the farm Løken, which is now a local museum. She then cleared the land for a new farm, Elverhøy.
She taught herself to speak Norwegian, cohabited with the translator, Oluf Endresen from Sunndal, and was said to be very generous, giving magnificent parties for the bourgeoisie.
She took an interest in the local health service and the local rifle club, founded a local library and was an agricultural pioneer. She brought poultry and swine from Great Britain to the valley.
And she wrote books about chicken farming, The Henwife (1861) and The Henwife – Her own experience in her own Poultry-Yard (1870). She had built Alfheim, the mountain farm high up above the valley of Grødalen, in 1876.
Her English bank went bankrupt in 1886.
She sold some of its properties, but bankruptcy and forced sales was inevitable. Her board and lodging were paid for by benevolent neighbours. From 1892 to her death she lived in poverty at Einabu near the village of Grøa.
Leikvin Cultural Heritage Park (Leikvin Bygdemuseum) has a collection from Barbara Arbuthnott"s estate.
The musical Lady Arbuthnott – The mistress of Elverhøy (Lady Arbuthnott -Frua på Elverhøy), by Norwegian playwright, Stig Nilsson with music by Lars Ramsøy-Halle, has been performed annually since the Sunndal Cultural Festival (Sunndal Kulturfestival) of 1996. The documentary film, Lady Arbuthnott – The Queen of Sunndal was shown during 1999 on the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation.