Articles by Colin MacLean which were published in the Glasgow Herald and The Times in the 1940s drew heavily on information from his mother's letters, as did a television programme on the 1843 Disruption and his family, which was broadcast by the BBC in Scotland in the early '70s. But Isabella MacLean was his mother, and, for all he knew, everyone's mother wrote like that, and it was only gradually that Colin MacLean came to realize how exceptional was her memory and how unusual her talent as a letter-writer, and to kick himself for not having kept all or most of her letters. But by the mid-1950s time lay heavy at last on his mother's hands, and she was persuaded to compose a number of set pieces about family and places and people and experiences, principally about the years before 1925. Much of what she wrote drew on the Saturday morning meetings with her grandmother in Lilybank Place and then Mid Stocket Road, Aberdeen, at the turn of the century, and also on extended family chat at a time long before radio, television etc. came to turn interests outward and threaten the survival of family conversation.
And so she brings to life her husband, her parents and the many characters who make up the chequered pattern of one distinctive sector of Scottish life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.