James Macpherson

Though AS disliked Samuel Johnson, many of her literary opinions were conservative. She still loved Ossian in 1796, when the texts were known to be forgeries. On 24 August 1807 (despite her admiration for Robert Southey

EH 's next novel, the St Clair of the Isles; or, The Outlaws of Barra. A Scottish Tradition, published anonymously but claimed on later title-pages, reveals considerable knowledge of Ossian and of medieval customs.

The title-page of this very rare book goes on: To which is added, a Description of part of the Main Land of Scotland, and of the Isles of Mull, Ulva, Staffa, I-Columbkill...

One month before writing this poem Elizabeth Smith met Mary Hunt , with whom she was soon maintaining a scholarly correspondence. In the earliest letter which Bowdler prints (written on 7 July 1792), Smith touches...

Elizabeth Smith's surviving letters are all written to female friends. The earliest ones are precociously concerned with exercising her learning: not precisely showing off but defining her own personality through her passion for Ossian and...

Among undated poems Bowdler prints another imitation of Ossian and a translation from the German of Friedrich von Matthisson . In 1803 ES translated a poem by Gessner in response to William Sotheby

The work has a frontispiece showing the castle of Dierenstein, built on a rocky crag. Dedicating it to the Austrian eagle, she thanks it for sheltering a dove [herself] flying from birds of prey...

CB took various steps to guard against association with the project of James Macpherson , whose Ossian ic poems which purported to be ancient Scottish works were more fabricated than adapted. She includes in her...

Her preface to the whole volume expresses regret, probably purely conventional, that her comparatively feeble hand cannot wield the pen of learning and antiquity. She professes to be [u]nacquainted with the rules of translation...

Choice of women writers is fairly generous, with excerpts from Hester Mulso Chapone , John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld (Evenings at Home), Susanna Haswell Rowson , Elizabeth Carter , Hester Thrale ,...

Her titles provide a brief guide to romantic sensibility: the macabre (Death and the Lady, The Skeleton Priest, and The Dying Lover, written for a friend whose amiable young man

Letters from the Mountains was not noticed in the Edinburgh Review, an omission which Grant attributed to gender prejudice. The Critical gave it a brutal review, which began by turning seriously against the...

This novel is well supplied with quotations: Macpherson 's Ossian on the title-page and Robert Blair (The Grave) to open the first volume, with Shakespeare and Milton for the succeeding volumes. It opens...

The title-page quotes Dryden . The story opens in Scotland, twenty miles from Glasgow, with the humble clergyman Dr Woodville giving reluctant permission for his unsophisticated young daughter, Anna, to attend a charity ball...

The poem picked out by the Critical Review as the principal one, occupying fourteen pages, is entitled Lines found on the Stairs of the Tour de la Chapelle of the Bastile. These lines, powerful...