Robert Burns

Its engaging heroine, Maggie Grey, combines the names of both lovers in Burns 's well-known song, but unlike Burns's Maggie she marries up, her eventual husband, Geoffrey Trafford, being the cousin of an earl. She...

EH seeks to raise the canonical status of the novel in this work not only by serious politico-philosophical content, but also by chapter-heading quotations from the classics (from Horace , Shakespeare , and Milton to...

This well-characterized and engaging novel puts forward the idea that passion is necessary although dangerous if uncontrolled: an idea anticipating Veitch's later sensation novel The Dean's Daughter. The story is set at a town...

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...

JH composed from a young age; between the ages of seventeen and nineteen she produced about twenty pieces of religious poetry. She was strongly influenced by her reading of the Bible, by the...

Among her favourite writers were Alfred Tennyson , Sir Walter Scott , George Eliot (whose The Mill on the Floss made a deep impression on her), and Charles Kingsley , whose Two Years Ago...

One of these Scots songs, the humorous Fee him, father, fee him, written for her friend and fellow-author Fanny Head of Ashfield in Devon, was early enough to be admired by Burns .

Some nineteenth-century commentators made high claims for COLN , ranking her close to Burns himself (though Burns scholars have found it hard to forgive her unacted-on intention of producing a bowdlerised edition of Burns). She...

The Eclectic Magazine raised her confidence about her Scots songs by pronouncing that she was easily the equal in the genre of Scott or Campbell , and inferior only to Burns himself.

For more than four years, from December 1788 to March 1793, Frances Anna Dunlop peppered her letters to Burns with comments about JL 's poetry, and sought to elicit criticism in return. When Burns first...

In 1886 the Dictionary of National Biography said SBdeserves more recognition than she has yet received.An article in the Journal of the Lakeland Dialect Society in 1947 argued that her best work was...

Dunlop wrote, Methinks I hear you ask me with an air that made me feel as I had got a slap in the face, if you must read all the few lines I had pointed...

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...

Critic Kirsteen McCue has examined the issued involved in the dispute over whether Burns or Pagan was the author of the song, and over which was the first to convey it to print.

Again one of Yearsley's most perceptive readers was Anna Seward , who wrote to Helen Maria Williams on Christmas Day 1787 that Yearsley and Burns were both miracles . . . . Perhaps she has...