Reviewer: Keith Gregson from Sunderland

I have long been a fan of Susanna Blamire and have restored a number of her songs in recent years. I also sing them. For a long time I have felt that Susanna has been 'unsung' in many ways and in need of exposure as she is an important literary figure. Ironically if she had been born a few miles further north - across the Scottish border - she may have gained greater attention.

Christopher Maycock has more than set the ball rolling in a big way. He has researched with great enthusiasm and it this enthusiasm which shines through his writing. I wanted to know more about Susanna and I was certainly much wiser after reading the book. If it does not quite 'hang together'as a whole, it comes as no surprise. There are so many aspects of her life unstudied and worthy of study. I particularly enjoyed the way in which the author brought his medical knowledge to bear in working out the cause of Susanna's infuential (and eventually fatal) illness. He also uses extracts from her poetry to show that she was almost as much a doctor as a poet - an intriguing byline worthy of further research by medical historians.

Above all Christopher Maycock introduces new readers to a lady worth knowing. If she had lived today, she would have been a top singer/songwriter and performer. That has long been my view and the book has certainly strengthened that view. Her personality shines through everything - including the confines of Eighteenth Century British Society.

To the newcomer to Susanna, my advice would be to read the book carefully - both the analysis and the works chosen by Christopher Maycock. If you then come to a different conclusion from the author, nothing is lost as it surely time for debate on this most worthy of literary figures and the more in the discussion the merrier.

From the Author

This is the definitive modern biography of the eighteenth-century poet Susanna Blamire (1747-94).

It has some thirty-six monochrome illustrations, and one colour portrait. Much of the information about Susanna in books and on websites is either out of date, or inaccurate.

Described as both 'the Poet of Friendship'' and as ‘the best woman writer of her age', Susanna Blamire is a much more sophisticated lady than has previously been recognised. Her writings represent an important transition from the ‘Augustan Age’ to the ‘Romantic Revolution’ of Wordsworth and Coleridge. She anticipates their Lyrical Ballads in her Scottish and Cumbrian dialect songs, which describe either powerful personal emotions or the feelings and lives of ‘ordinary’ people.

The biography has descriptions of a thwarted romance with an aristocrat (one of the best amateur cricketers of his day); a diagnosis of her serious recurrent illness; her life as a female practitioner of orthodox medicine; her interest in the Picturesque Movement, particularly at Painshill Park in Surrey (her brother Richmond was the publisher of many of William Gilpin's works on the picturesque); and a North American Captivity Narrative. In her lifetime she was the anonymous author of some superb Scottish songs.

The biography radiates the atmosphere of the eighteenth-century particularly of Cumbria and the Scottish lowlands, described by the radical Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid as the ancient kingdom of Bernicia. Macdiarmid greatly regretted Susanna's ill-deserved obscurity, and described her Scottish songs as the high-water mark of her achievement, and equal to ‘the best ever produced by Scotsmen writing in their own tongue’. He saw her Cumbrian songs as perfect masterpieces of dramatic dialect poetry.

She was a lively, amusing and brave woman who used her writing of poetry, singing and dancing as a joyful way of maintaining friendships, and at times for coping with the difficulties that beset her. As a beautiful young woman - ‘a bonny and verra lish young lass’ - her dark eyes sparkled with animation. Her passion for dancing was such that when she met travelling musicians on the road she would dismount and dance to a jig or hornpipe. In order to share her thoughts with others she would pin scraps of verse to oak trees for passing travellers to read.

Susanna never wrote a diary, and apart from the two remarkable collections of original verse manuscripts that have miraculously survived, only three letters and an unpublished prose allegory in manuscript still exist. However behind her poems and songs is the rich context of her emotional and personal life. Her sister-in-law's unpublished diary is also a vital source of information, and provided important clues for my essential research.

Here is a fascinating woman’s view of the eighteenth-century, which touches on the poet’s response to The Seven Years War (French and Indian), The American War of Independence, and The Revolutionary War with France. Initially enthused by the French Revolution, Susanna came to see that its ideals had been betrayed by the reign of terror. Her revolutionary poem The Nun’s Return to the World, by the Decree of the National Assembly of France, February 1790, may possibly have influenced Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon. She was a friend of the philosopher, Dr. William Paley, Archdeacon of Carlisle, and her Cumbrian dialect dialogue-song on the hated Tithe System echoes Paley’s dislike of tithes.

There is a section of ‘Selected Poems’ at the end. However those who have read the biography have remarked that "anyone more specifically interested in biography and history would enjoy it equally." An author of books on the History of Medicine has remarked: this is ‘a wonderful work of scholarship. … Susanna really was quite a lady and well worth rescuing from obscurity’.