Susanna Blamire

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Standard Name: Blamire, Susanna
Birth Name: Susanna Blamire
Nickname: Sukey
Pseudonym: A Lady
Pseudonym: The Muse of Cumberland
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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Anna Maria Bennett
AMB 's daughter Harriet married, in 1784, a naval lieutenant, James Esten; they had two children. She made her theatre debut at Bristol two years later, probably under her mother's influence, and went on to...
Literary responses Lady Charlotte Elliot
LCE received little critical attention either during or after her lifetime. The Athenæum obituary by Theodore Watts described her as perhaps the latest noticeable addition to that bright roll of female poets of which Scotland...
Textual Features Jane Taylor
In this volume Recreation, an account of a female tea-party (beginning We took our work, and went, you see)
qtd. in
Armitage, Doris Mary. The Taylors of Ongar. W. Heffer and Sons, 1939.
142
catches a breathless dialogue of back-biting and slander. It shares its bustling tone...
Textual Production Hannah Cowley
HC wrote this, she says, on reading in newspapers how Pitcairne Green in Scotland had been marked out as a new village on uninhabited ground, for the purpose of introducing Lancashare manufactures to Scotland.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
61 (1786): 464
Textual Production Carolina Oliphant Lady Nairne
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...
Textual Production Carolina Oliphant Lady Nairne
Purdie and Smith worked at the behest of an all-female editorial committee
McGuirk, Carol. “Jacobite History to National Song: Robert Burns and Carolina Oliphant (Baroness Nairne)”. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Vol.
47
, No. 2/3, 1 June–30 Nov. 2006, pp. 253-87.
258
The anthology came out in six volumes, printing the music along with the words of its songs; its editor was the greatest...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Sarah Tytler
The book is prefaced by a glossary which informs the reader that Edinburgh is nicknamed Auld Reekie, that to gowl is to weep noisily, to rug and rive is to carry off by violence...

Timeline

2 September 1752: Falling into line with the rest of Europe,...

National or international item

2 September 1752

Falling into line with the rest of Europe, Britain changed from the Julian calendar (developed by the Romans) to the Gregorian calendar, which corrected its accumulated slippage backwards from astronomical time; the next day...

August 1779-1783: Gibraltar sustained its longest blockade...

National or international item

August 1779-1783

Gibraltar sustained its longest blockade during its years as a British possession; writers like Mary Darwall and Catharine Upton chronicled this siege's acts of heroism, while Susanna Blamire gave voice to an ordinary soldier.
Messenger, Ann. Woman and Poet in the Eighteenth Century: The Life of Mary Whateley Darwall (1738-1825). AMS Press, 1999.
143-4

13 February 1790: The French National Assembly decreed that...

National or international item

13 February 1790

The FrenchNational Assembly decreed that French law would no longer recognise monastic vows.
“The Catholic Encyclopedia”. New Advent.

15 February 1791: The actress Harriet Pye Esten (daughter of...

Writing climate item

15 February 1791

The actress Harriet Pye Esten (daughter of novelist Anna Maria Bennett ) gave a highly successful recitation at Covent Garden Theatre of William Collins 's Ode on the Passions.
Maycock, Christopher. A Passionate Poet: Susanna Blamire, 1747-94: A Biography. Hypatia, 2003.
91-2

8 August 1851: The system of tithes (one-tenth of the produce...

National or international item

8 August 1851

The system of tithes (one-tenth of the produce of agricultural land paid yearly for the support of the Church of England ) was abolished at the instigation of William Blamire the younger (1790-1862).
Maycock, Christopher. A Passionate Poet: Susanna Blamire, 1747-94: A Biography. Hypatia, 2003.
97
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Blamire

Texts

Maxwell, Patrick, and Susanna Blamire. “Preface and Memoir”. The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire, edited by Henry Lonsdale et al., J. Menzies, 1842, p. i - xlvii.
Blamire, Susanna, and Catherine Gilpin. Songs and Poems. Editor Coward, George, George Routledge, 1866.
Blamire, Susanna. “Stoklewath; or, The Cumbrian Village”. The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire, edited by Henry Lonsdale and Patrick Maxwell, J. Menzies, 1842, pp. 1-40.
Blamire, Susanna. The Poetical Works. Woodstock Books, 1994.
Blamire, Susanna. The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire. Editors Lonsdale, Henry and Patrick Maxwell, J. Menzies, 1842.