Aleksandra Helena Tobiasz

Institute of Civilisation and Culture in Ljubljana

Fanny Copeland, “A Scotswoman by Birth but a Slav by Adoption” and her Self-Identification between Scotland and Slovenia

Fanny Copeland, “a Scotswoman by birth but a Slav by adoption”, was a linguist, translator, poet and alpinist. As a secretary, and a translator of the Yugoslav delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, she supported the establishment of a new state of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Copeland was also translating politically engaged texts of Yugoslav authors about borderland issues and minorities. She was awarded the highest Yugoslav distinction – the Order of Saint Sava. She was the first woman to give lectures (specifically, on English language and literature) at the University in Ljubljana. Whereas her texts on geography and Alps have been thoroughly studied, her extensive autobiography is still unpublished. In this contribution, I would like to address Copeland’s ego-documents (autobiography and letters) with the aim of studying her self-identification. Why was she such a fervent supporter of Yugoslavia? Was it because of her Scottish origins, and thus of the minority status that she became an advocate of new small nation states in East-Central Europe? Copeland’s autobiography and correspondence can shed more light on the mechanisms of her self-identification reshaped during her numerous travels in Yugoslavia, thus in the face of cultural otherness and in relation to changeable spatial contexts extending between the two worlds, British and Slavic.