Mary Frances was the youngest of the five children of Cunninghame Borthwick, 19th Lord Borthwick and his wife Harriet Alice. She was privately educated. The family lived in Mayfair as her father worked as a stockbroker, but since 1870 they had also owned property in Scotland: Ravenstone Castle at Glasserton, Wigtownshire, now Dumfries and Galloway. In 1897 Mary Frances married Judge Harold Chaloner Dowdall, KC. They had four children. Judge Harold Dowdall was the subject of a 1909 painting by Augustus John made at the end of his term as Lord Mayor of Liverpool. One account of the painting contains incidental information on the work and on the Dowdalls. Mary Frances Dowdall herself had her portrait painted in oils by the British lithographer and painter Charles Hazelwood Shannon, whose surviving papers include correspondence with Harold Chaloner Dowdall and his mother and wife about the arrangements for portrait sittings and exhibitions of their portraits.
Writings
Mary Frances Dowdall began her writing career with contributions to periodicals, including Time & Tide. These stoked five books of amusing non-fiction on the difficulties of housekeeping, marriage and social relations, published by Duckworth: The Book of Martha, Joking Apart..., The Second Book of Martha, etc., Manners & Tone of Good Society and Questionable Antics. In addition, Duckworth published four novels by Dowdall addressing the problems of marriage, beginning with The Kaleidoscope. Susie Yesterday, To-Day, and Forever presents a young woman with suspect motives, which backfire in an unhappy marriage. Three Loving Ladies explores the lack of communication between men and women: "I have to treat what I want to say as if it were to a foreigner and had to be translated into his language." The novel explains this in terms of radically different gender characteristics: "He wants to preserve his own qualities; you want to preserve yours; they are wholly contradictory, and one side or the other must impose its well." The Tactless Man has its protagonist bargaining with her husband for treatment as a complete person, not a "wretched button-faced, bird-happy, soap-spirited fool". Facsimiles of several of Dowdall's books are available.
