James Macpherson

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 ,...

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

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...

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