James Macpherson

Though AS disliked Samuel Johnson, many of her literary opinions were conservative. She still loved Ossian in 1796, when the texts were known to be forgeries. On 24 August 1807 (despite her admiration for Robert Southey

One month before writing this poem Elizabeth Smith met Mary Hunt , with whom she was soon maintaining a scholarly correspondence. In the earliest letter which Bowdler prints (written on 7 July 1792), Smith touches...

Elizabeth Smith's surviving letters are all written to female friends. The earliest ones are precociously concerned with exercising her learning: not precisely showing off but defining her own personality through her passion for Ossian and...

Among undated poems Bowdler prints another imitation of Ossian and a translation from the German of Friedrich von Matthisson . In 1803 ES translated a poem by Gessner in response to William Sotheby

EH 's next novel, the St Clair of the Isles; or, The Outlaws of Barra. A Scottish Tradition, published anonymously but claimed on later title-pages, reveals considerable knowledge of Ossian and of medieval customs.

The title-page of this very rare book goes on: To which is added, a Description of part of the Main Land of Scotland, and of the Isles of Mull, Ulva, Staffa, I-Columbkill...

The work has a frontispiece showing the castle of Dierenstein, built on a rocky crag. Dedicating it to the Austrian eagle, she thanks it for sheltering a dove [herself] flying from birds of prey...

CB took various steps to guard against association with the project of James Macpherson , whose Ossian ic poems which purported to be ancient Scottish works were more fabricated than adapted. She includes in her...

Her preface to the whole volume expresses regret, probably purely conventional, that her comparatively feeble hand cannot wield the pen of learning and antiquity. She professes to be [u]nacquainted with the rules of translation...

Her titles provide a brief guide to romantic sensibility: the macabre (Death and the Lady, The Skeleton Priest, and The Dying Lover, written for a friend whose amiable young man

Choice of women writers is fairly generous, with excerpts from Hester Mulso Chapone , John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld (Evenings at Home), Susanna Haswell Rowson , Elizabeth Carter , Hester Thrale ,...

Letters from the Mountains was not noticed in the Edinburgh Review, an omission which Grant attributed to gender prejudice. The Critical gave it a brutal review, which began by turning seriously against the...

The contents included odes, sonnets (including one sequence from Petrarch and another based on Goethe 's Werther, in which she speaks as the male lover of a woman, with notes relating her poems to...

That is, she took Ossian as a model for a lament for her own chosen ancient hero. The din of war is drowned by one more great and more terrific sound; / A sound high...

AF writes in the style of mid-century poets Gray and especially Collins , whose names she specifically invokes and whose words she echoes, along with classics of the past like Petrarch . She records an...