Flora Isabel MacDonald – politician, humanitarian, adventurer, and role model for a generation of women – was known across Canada and beyond simply as Flora. In her memoir, co-authored by award-winning journalist and author Geoffrey Stevens, she tells her personal story for the very first time. Flora! describes her amazing journey from her childhood and her time at secretarial school in Cape Breton, through her years in backroom Progressive Conservative politics, to elected office and her appointment as Canada’s first female minister of foreign affairs. Finally, she details her exceptional humanitarian work in India and in war-torn Africa and Afghanistan. Flora was driven by a lifelong conviction that there is nothing a woman cannot achieve in a world controlled by men, and she pursued this conviction in everything she did, carving a path for women in Parliament. She won international acclaim for bringing 60,000 Vietnamese refugees to Canada, and for engineering the rescue of six American hostages in Tehran in a top-secret collaboration with the CIA known as the Canadian Caper. She exposed the inhumane treatment of inmates at Kingston’s Prison for Women. She defied male chauvinists in the Progressive Conservative party by running for its leadership, and she introduced the Employment Equity Act to guarantee women equal access to federal jobs. Flora was brave. She was relentless. She was controversial. She was a force of nature. In her own words and drawing from interviews with those who knew her, Flora! grants us insight into this exceptional woman who changed the course of history.

Her name is immortalised because of her part in the escape of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, 'Bonnie Prince Charlie', in 1746, but little is known about the rest of her life. Ruairidh H. MacLeod draws on original, unpublished material in Britain and North America to give a full account of one of the most romantic figures in Scottish history. She was no shy young girl, but a resolute woman of 24 who played a courageous part in rescuing the Prince from his enemies. When arrested, she did all she could to protect others who helped the Prince escape, and displayed a maturity that astonished her admirers and won her many friends.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.