Robert Burns

In a critical preface HS reveals her gender though not her name. She opens by invoking the author of Rienzi (either, Mary Russell Mitford or Edward Bulwer Lytton ). The two groups of lovers and...

The arborist re-reads Oliver Twist alongside their partner's lectures and urges the partner to consider discussing the musical form of the novel (a request accommodated, as the academic threads it in alongside Auld Lang Syne...

The chapter headings quote a range of canonical or contemporary writers, including Shakespeare , Milton , Pope , Thomson , Goldsmith , William Mason , John Langhorne , Burns , Erasmus Darwin , Edward Young

A central figure in both Irish and English literary circles as well as in Irish politics, DS sought, through writing ballads, to recuperate the lost tradition of Irish balladry and folklore while simultaneously addressing the...

CMS 's first novel, A New-England Tale; or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners, was licensed: it appeared anonymously that year, with a title-page stanza from Robert Burns , dedicated to Maria Edgeworth .

MR 's perceptive and generous analysis and appreciation of Burns 's character and writings appeared anonymously in the Dumfries Weekly Journal only a fortnight after his death.

MR was a talented amateur poet, diarist, letter-writer, and writer for children during the Romantic period. She published in 1788 a travel book about the Caribbean which is remarkable for its scientific observation, a critical...

MR 's brother-in-law Robert Riddell of Glenriddell , who lived at Friar's Carse in Dumfries, was to shape her life through his literary antiquarianism and especially through his friendship with Robert Burns .

In the public mind MR is remembered primarily as a friend of Robert Burns . She first met him in late 1791. They soon developed a free-and-easy, bantering, affectionate correspondence. It was not exclusively literary...

As a friend rather than a lover, Burns was crucially helpful to MR . He first put her in touch with the printer, intellectual, and naturalist William Smellie , who published her work and became...

The Christmas rupture with Burns seems to have taken effect only gradually. After the key event Burns sent MR a copy of Werther (Goethe 's novel, probably in English translation) as well as returning...

During the last months of Burns 's life, Riddell was again sending him her verses to read. He dined at her house, though too weak to walk, on 5 July 1796, and asked her sardonically...

In 1793 Burns was soliciting from MR a song for the antiquarian anthologist George Thomson (presumably for A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, which began publication this year). In summer 1795 she sent...

Robert Burns helped her to achieve publication, writing to the Edinburgh printer and man of letters William Smellie on 22 January 1792 that her poems were always correct and sometimes elegant, very much beyond the...

MR calls Burns 's death an irreparable loss to the public, but concentrates more on his character than his writings, as needing more defence. Indeed, she suggests that Burns in conversation and argument was...