Susanna Blamire

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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.
Head-and-shoulders portrait in crayon of Susanna Blamire by Giacomo Cambruzzi, c. 1777. She has a fashionably high hairstyle with some locks hanging loose behind, and a scoop-neck blue gown.

Milestones

12 January 1747

SB was born at Cardew Hall, near Dalston in Cumberland, the youngest in a family of four survivors out of six.
Maycock, Christopher. A Passionate Poet: Susanna Blamire, 1747-94: A Biography. Hypatia.
2
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1771

SB is said to have written or begun writing Stoklewath; or, The Cumbrian Village. If it does date from this year, it remained unfinished and unpublished for seventy years.
Maxwell, Patrick, and Susanna Blamire. “Preface and Memoir”. The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire, edited by Henry Lonsdale et al., J. Menzies, p. i - xlvii.
xxxvi

April 1793

SB seems to have been writing her last datable poems about now, a year before she died. Several concern the fragility of her own health.
Wordsworth, Jonathan. The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age. Woodstock Books.
90
Maycock, Christopher. A Passionate Poet: Susanna Blamire, 1747-94: A Biography. Hypatia.
108

5 April 1794

SB died at 14 Finkle Street, Carlisle, almost certainly of rheumatic heart disease, at the age of forty-seven.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Maycock, Christopher. A Passionate Poet: Susanna Blamire, 1747-94: A Biography. Hypatia.
110, 135

Biography

Birth and Origins

12 January 1747

SB was born at Cardew Hall, near Dalston in Cumberland, the youngest in a family of four survivors out of six.
Maycock, Christopher. A Passionate Poet: Susanna Blamire, 1747-94: A Biography. Hypatia.
2
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

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