Susanna Blamire

12 January 1747 - 05 April 1794

Standard Name: Blamire, Susanna

Birth Name: Susanna Blamire

Nickname: Sukey

Pseudonym: A Lady

Pseudonym: The Muse of Cumberland

SB was a later eighteenth-century poet with strong local roots. From her youth she wrote occasional poems and songs for her friends. She gave them away, generally without keeping copies. Some slipped anonymously and separately into print. She was a great observer of social life, and a gently humorous satirist of it. Some poems (including her best-known, the topographical poem Stoklewath; or, The Cumbrian Village) carry a political message. Her surviving output of about a hundred poems and songs is mostly written in standard English, but she has been most steadily remembered for her works in two distinct dialects: Scots and Cumbrian.

Kushigian, Nancy, and Stephen C. Behrendt, editors. Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period.

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Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships	Anna Maria Bennett	AMB 's daughter Harriet married, in 1784, a naval lieutenant, James Esten; they had two children. She made her theatre debut at Bristol two years later, probably under her mother's influence, and went on to...
Literary responses	Lady Charlotte Elliot	LCE received little critical attention either during or after her lifetime. The Athenæum obituary by Theodore Watts described her as perhaps the latest noticeable addition to that bright roll of female poets of which Scotland...
Textual Features	Jane Taylor	In this volume Recreation, an account of a female tea-party (beginning We took our work, and went, you see) Armitage, Doris Mary. The Taylors of Ongar. W. Heffer and Sons, 1939. 142 catches a breathless dialogue of back-biting and slander. It shares its bustling tone...
Textual Production	Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne	Purdie and Smith worked at the behest of an all-female editorial committee McGuirk, Carol. “Jacobite History to National Song: Robert Burns and Carolina Oliphant (Baroness Nairne)”. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, No. 2/3, pp. 253 - 87. 258 The anthology came out in six volumes, printing the music along with the words of its songs; its editor was the greatest...
Textual Production	Hannah Cowley	HC wrote this, she says, on reading in newspapers how Pitcairne Green in Scotland had been marked out as a new village on uninhabited ground, for the purpose of introducing Lancashare manufactures to Scotland. Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall. 61 (1786): 464
Textual Production	Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne	In this year both Susanna Blamire (visiting there) and Robert Burns were writing in Perthshire. This, too, was the year that Carolina Oliphant's father died, and it has been suggested that grief and a...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text	Sarah Tytler	The book is prefaced by a glossary which informs the reader that Edinburgh is nicknamed Auld Reekie, that to gowl is to weep noisily, to rug and rive is to carry off by violence...

Timeline

2 September 1752

Falling into line with the rest of Europe, Britain changed from the Julian calendar (developed by the Romans) to the Gregorian calendar, which corrected its accumulated slippage backwards from astronomical time; the next day...

August 1779-1783

Gibraltar sustained its longest blockade during its years as a British possession; writers like Mary Darwall and Catharine Upton chronicled this siege's acts of heroism, while Susanna Blamire gave voice to an ordinary soldier.

13 February 1790

The FrenchNational Assembly decreed that French law would no longer recognise monastic vows.

15 February 1791

The actress Harriet Pye Esten (daughter of novelist Anna Maria Bennett ) gave a highly successful recitation at Covent Garden Theatre of William Collins 's Ode on the Passions.

8 August 1851

The system of tithes (one-tenth of the produce of agricultural land paid yearly for the support of the Church of England ) was abolished at the instigation of William Blamire the younger (1790-1862).