The great Scottish poet Robert Burns had a friend, a fellow writer, with
whom he exchanged letters on a very regular basis, over many years, and even
left a four-line poem in one of her notebooks after paying her a visit. He got
remembered; she not only got forgotten, but the notebook in which she wrote her
poems was lost.
Then some of the poetry turned up in an obscure Scottish newspaper in 1919, which
set the scholars off into the Rabbie Burns archive in search of her. And lo
and behold there it was, the full manuscript with, given the date, yet one more
obscure Jane Austen connection to add
to the growing list on this blog: "Poems by a Lady" they were called;
but no, they were never published, only shared with friends, so would Jane have known about them, enough to "borrow"
the title for her own pseudonym? There is no copyright on unpublished
manuscripts, and given her connections in the literary world, her habit of centoing the phrases that really impacted for her, I am absolutely
certain that the second "By A Lady" knew.
But back to the notebook, thirty-nine poems in all, and the range is
vast: satires, verse-letters, even a long dramatic monologue of what today
would be called "psychological introspection", though in her time it
was simply where the Romantic movement was beginning its explorations of a new
reason to write: inward reflection. The titles of all the poems can be found here, though you will have to buy the book
to read them. Later there were novels as well, five of the rather Gothic sort, mostly
set around Dumfries where she grew up, written to pay her bills rather than to explore her inwards.
Oh,
and her name - that almost got lost too, at least in this entry. Helen Craik. Born somewhere around 1751, she
died, still unmarried, at her last home, Flimby Hall on the Cumbrian coast just
south of the Scottish border, today in 1825.
This the headline anyway, and this the subject of Homer's "Iliad", the founding work of European literature, long before Dante, which usually gets that attribution... But wait a minute, calling it "literature", comparing it with Dante... doesn't that suggest that Homer made the story up, that it isn't "authentic history"? And was that changed by the discovery of an authentic city of Troy, by Heinrich Schliemann, in 1868?
Ben Jonson, English poet and dramatist, Shakespeare's drinking partner ("True happiness," he once wrote, "consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice"), born today in 1572.
John Constable, English landscape painter, born today in 1776 - for my piece on the "other and better" Hay Wain, click here.
Richard Georg Strauss, German composer, born today in 1864, or at least, so said Zarathustra.
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