Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne

COLN was a significant member of the Scottish ballad revival, writing or radically revising something like eighty songs in the final decade of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Their various forms notably include the dramatic monologue. Much of her work was carried around the world by the Scottish diaspora, and many of her ballads are still well-known. Her openly Jacobite songs, the earliest she wrote, are often considered the best. Changes in the cultural climate and in her personal belief-system meant that while many of her early songs are cheeky and irreverent, her later ones are more pious and correct.