This is not to say that the voices of Scottish women poets were similarly ignored in earlier times, however, for their names do in fact figure in earlier literary histories and anthologies, especially those dating from the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Like their English (and Irish and Welsh) counterparts, Scottish women poets were in these accounts recognized and credited, but like them too their recognition frequently came in a bracketed and piecemeal fashion that misrepresented what was for many of them a substantial commitment to their poetry. Moreover, their literary efforts already stood at a double disadvantage within the dominant "British" national literary culture, as is clear from what Gifford and McMillan say about the way those efforts have typically been devalued alongside the work of English women writers. Further still, to the strong cultural bias against a non-standard Anglophone idiom that plagued vernacular writers of both genders (as also did, for that matter, comparable biases involving class, race, and religion) were added significant other constraints concerning form, genre, and subject matter that related entirely to their gender.

Like much of the literary history of the British Isles that was written by the later Victorians and their twentieth-century male successors, that which focused upon Scotland historically regarded male authors as the really "legitimate" ones: they were the artists whose careers were wholly invested in an art that was both "literary" and philosophical — "serious" poetry, in other words. Moreover, Romantic male poets of Scotland — not just Burns and Scott but also the colloquialist Andrew Scott (1757-1839), the classicist John Leyden (1775-1811), the prolific Thomas Campbell, the "Ettrick Shepherd" James Hogg, and the long-suffering James Montgomery — have virtually from the start been discussed in terms of sizable and articulated bodies of work that comprise extensive and diverse records of experience and application — of inspiration, composition, publication, and reputation. Indeed, even so recently as 1993 a scholarly book could be called Poetry as an Occupation and An Art in Britain, 1760-1830, could focus on MacPherson, Burns, Hogg, Scott, and William Wordsworth, and yet not even mention any of their female contemporaries for whom poetry was without question both an occupation and an art (Murphy). Male poets are understood, in other words, to have had writing careers.

Scottish women poets of the Romantic period have historically fared differently. Their accomplishments have been recorded, for the most part, in the terms which masculinist rhetoric traditionally reserves for work that is tolerated rather than encouraged, accepted rather than rewarded, and noted rather than praised. The rhetoric of the criticism that proceeds from such thoroughly gendered intellectual and cultural assumptions consistently minimizes women's accomplishments by presenting them as both exceptions and as curiosities, as brief forays into what is implied to be a virtually exclusively male arena. If they were to be praised within this context, women poets were expected to stick to subjects and sentiments deemed culturally appropriate for them. This meant, for the most part, devotional verse (including poetic paraphrases of scripture), moral essays in verse, and poetry intended for children (and for other "unsophisticated" or "uneducated" and therefore presumably "inferior" readers who were understood to be "beneath" male poets' more exalted voice and regard). It also meant lyrical verse — whether sentimental or colloquial — and therefore also a "minor" poetic form. In particular, this meant the ballad form, and it is in that area that the achievements of Scottish women poets have traditionally been most widely celebrated. Catherine Kerrigan has suggested, for example, that "women played such a significant role as tradition bearers and transmitters that it can be claimed that the ballad tradition is one of the most readily identifiable areas of literary performance by women" (2), a point that was in fact frequently acknowledged by poets like Burns, Scott, and Hogg, all of whom credited women as prime sources (though often in an oral rather than a written tradition) for their own material. Writing in 1822 about the poetry of Byron, Wordsworth, and Scott, one critic suggested that narrative poetry (of which ballads form a major part) had become little more that "a mere apology for digressions — a peg to hang dissertations and description on." Implying that narrative left fewer opportunities for virtuoso performances, he observed: "[a]ll these authors are men of genius, but they know it too well, and will not trust their reputation to works, the worth of which would seem to the vulgar more owing to the materials than the artist. . . . This peculiar bias in the mind of our poets is a sufficient damper to any hopes of a revival of the ballad style of writing. . ." (W. W. 735).

Traditional literary history's characterization of Scottish women poets and their work stressed the morally and intellectually chaste variety of their verse. Thus J. H. Millar could observe in 1903 that Lady Anne Barnard (1750-1825) and "her sister muses" tended in their poems on the whole to follow "the orthodox or Scottish mode of taking some rude, fragmentary, and not over-decent old Scots song or ballad, cleansing it of its impurities, making it coherent, arraying it in decent apparel, and rendering it fit for decent society. In some cases the result savoured of emasculation. In others, and perhaps the majority, the lyric was all the better for the process" (399). What is particularly interesting about Millar's rhetoric is how it situates women poets firmly within the sphere of culturally-determined domestic duties: their treatment of their poetic raw material involves cleaning, organizing, clothing, "teaching," and otherwise "civilizing" it so as to suit it to "decent society." Millar's terminology tellingly reiterates the roles traditionally associated in post-Enlightenment Western culture with the recessive, nurturant, wholly domestic woman who in the Victorian culture becomes Coventry Patmore's famous "angel in the house," a role that implicitly situates her (and her art) in a position subservient to and in service to — rather than in partnership or competition with — her male counterparts (and their art and culture). Indeed, the only negative in Millar's comments is reserved for what his pointedly gendered language implies is a fault in their work: "emasculation."

Like the passage quoted above, another of Millar's observations about Scottish women poets reveals more to our twenty-first century sensibilities than its author intended a century ago: "Poetical composition, it should be added, was by no means confined to the male sex, and many women, from Earls' daughters to alehouse keepers, it is said, engaged in the pastime" (398). Note, for instance, how in suggesting that "it is said" that women of all ranks composed poetry, Millar implies that the documentary evidence does not exist (it does) and that the record of women's voices is therefore mere hearsay — a rumor. The word "pastime" likewise subtly devalues their work, situating it both apart from and below that of male poets, who Millar elsewhere describes as engaged not in pastimes but rather in professions or careers. Critical, methodological, and rhetorical paradigms of this sort, which have until relatively recently predominated in twentieth-century literary history, inherently dictate that women's poetry will consistently be regarded as ephemeral.

Moreover, such paradigms diminish women's poetry further still by representing it in terms of isolated bits rather than as aesthetic, intellectual, or cultural wholes. Millar credits the prolific Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), for example, with having "contributed to the common stock [of Scottish verse] The Weary Pund of Tow, Tam o' the Lin, and Saw ye Johnny Comin'," as if the rest of her poetry were a thing wholly apart, while his equivocating language likewise simultaneously celebrates and deprecates the famous "Auld Robin Gray" of Lady Anne Barnard (nee Lindsay; 1750-1825) when he calls the poem "probably the most popular (Burns's work apart) of the sentimental ditties with which Scots poetry abounds" (399) In a similarly revealing fashion, Millar's contemporary, Lauchlan Maclean Watt, has this to say about Anne Hunter (1741-1821):

There is no doubt that, had it not been for the fact that Michael [sic] Haydn had set some of her songs to music, the name of Mrs. Hunter, whose husband was the celebrated surgeon, would have long since found absolute oblivion. But one, at least, of them ["My mother bids me bind my hair"], and for the very reason urged, is still familiar. (354) Here is the familiar male critical positioning of the female artist: Hunter (who is not even furnished with the dignity of her own Christian name) is placed in the reflecting light of two men, her "celebrated" husband and the famous composer (not Michael Haydn but rather his elder brother Franz Joseph) who set some of her songs to music. Moreover, Watt's rhetoric clearly communicates his view that it is only Haydn's musical setting, and not any inherent aesthetic accomplishment in the poem, that saves Hunter's song from the "absolute oblivion" he implies it would otherwise merit. Participating at the beginning of the twentieth century in a culturally commonplace pattern of belittling reference and rhetoric so widespread that its gendered biases largely escaped notice — indeed, more likely met with assent — Millar and Watt devalued the work of the women poets they cited, reducing it to mere scraps, the odd one or two of which suffices to keep the author's otherwise unremembered name at least on the poetic roll.

Of course, part of the difficulty with such dated but nevertheless influential comments lies in the fact that the early twentieth century was neither especially receptive to, nor appreciative of, the poetry of Romanticism in any case, taken either in its historically narrow parameters or in the broader ones by which we now understand the era. Thus Millar spoke for many of his contemporaries when he said of Scottish poetry of the Romantic period generally that "there was much cry, but very little wool" (562). Nor is the estimate much better, generally, in recent times, if we can adopt the dim view of D. A. Low, who assures us that the nineteenth century "was not a good century for Scottish poets," perhaps because Scotland's inability (or unwillingness) to "offer adequate professional stimulus or outlets to all of her able writers" meant that in the poetry that did appear "strong originality was lacking" (193). Nor was the critical discourse much altered for women poets by mid-century. In Scottish Poetry: A Critical Survey (1955), for example, Robert Dewar recalls Baillie only in terms of "Saw ye Johnie comin'" and "Woo'd and Married an' a'," and Lady Anne Barnard (once again) in terms of "Auld Robin Gray," all of which poems he mentions in a single sentence about vernacular poets contemporary with Burns (208). Even the popular and prolific Scottish celebrant of the Jacobites, Carolina Oliphant, the Baroness Nairne (1766-1845) emerges in Dewar's formulation as "a sort of feminine Burns at best [my emphases]" who participated in the aforementioned "cleansing" activities associated with women poets by joining with other female contemporaries in a plan to produce a bowdlerized edition of Burns's songs (208-09). Indeed, this "critical survey" of Scottish poetry places all the women poets of the Romantic period in subsidiary relation to Burns by characterizing those individual poems singled out for praise as especially good examples of vernacular poems "in Burns's manner" (208).

Interestingly, though, one extensive anthology of Scottish poetry published near the end of the nineteenth century gave Lady Nairne her poetic due with a critical generosity that seems to have vanished a decade or so later. Introducing a selection of her poems, the editor used the poetic "yardstick" of Robert Burns in a rhetorically different fashion, writing that:

With a genius which was equally at home in the pathetic, the humorous, and the patriotic, Carolina Oliphant remains not only the sweetest and most famous singer of the lost Jacobite cause, but far and away the greatest of all Scottish lyric poets of her sex, and in two of her pieces, . . . ["The Land o' the Leal" and "The Laird o' Cockpen"], it does not appear extravagant to say, she is not surpassed even by Burns himself. (Eyre-Todd 2:295) This sort of acknowledgment and praise of women's poetry, which was relatively widespread throughout the nineteenth century, largely vanishes in the twentieth. It is not surprising, then, that wholly overlooked in the 1955 Scottish Poetry: A Critical Survey are once familiar poets like the proper Anne Macvicar Grant ("Mrs Grant of Laggan"; 1755-1838), best remembered for her popular long poem, "The Highlanders," and for Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen, her rebuttal to Anna Letitia Barbauld's unpopular pessimistic view of England's decline, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. Absent, too, are colorful poets like the remarkable dissolute, illiterate whiskey smuggler and private ale-house keeper, Isobel ("Tibbie") Pagan (c. 1741-1821) whose poems were dictated to an amanuensis (the tailor William Gemmell, who transcribed them and who presumably also tempered their reputedly characteristic bawdiness) and printed in Glasgow in 1803.

It remained for fairly recent scholarship — especially that produced in the wake of feminist theory and the far-reaching literary and cultural reassessments it has prompted — to begin in earnest the recovery of the poetry of Scottish women. The best example of such a recovery project to date is Catherine Kerrigan's Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (1991), which collects the work of over a hundred poets encompassing some six centuries of Anglophone and Gaelic verse. The long historical and cultural view provided by Kerrigan's anthology reveals both the diversity of Scottish women's poetry (and the voices contained therein) and the continuity of the literary tradition they represent, a tradition that ranges from conventional devout Calvinist moralism (including copious numbers of hymns or volumes like Mary McMorine's Poems, Chiefly on Religious Subjects [1799]) to rollicking bawdiness (Isobel Pagan's poems, for example), from sentimental lyric verse like Anne Hunter's to socially and politically committed poetry like that of the earlier Jean Adam (1710-65), the Romantic precursor whose publication in 1743 of her Miscellany Poems did not prevent her eventual destitution and death in a Glasgow poorhouse but whose works set the stage for a poetry of proletarian realism that would emerge by the end of the nineteenth century in poets like Dorothea Maria Ogilvy (1823-95).

Because Kerrigan's anthology is necessarily highly selective, though, a great many poets and works are still left out. The Romantic period is represented by fewer than a tenth of the period's active poets, for example, and even among those represented the selection of poems is small (Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, gets the most space but has nevertheless only five poems). Still, the editor's concluding comment indicates where her own project fits within the larger scheme of the recovery of women's poetic voices:

My purpose in producing this work was to provide a starting, not a finishing, point for the very real challenge that awaits those who are committed to the reclamation of women's literature. . . . [T]hat literature is not only a strong and vital part of a national tradition, it also belongs to the universal past of women's history and, at last, to our more promising future. (10) The present project contributes to this reclamation by presenting in a coherent and accessible fashion a large body of poetry by Scottish women of the Romantic period, and by representing that body of work as fairly and objectively as possible by making available not mere editorial selections but instead entire volumes. Only in this fashion can readers of all sorts, from the general reader to the student and the advanced professional research scholar, interact with the texts as aesthetic wholes, as their authors intended some two centuries ago.

When we come to the poetry of Scotland — as is the case also with that of Ireland — the powerful realities of political and cultural history intersect with those of literary history. For while the literary history of England can be sketched in relatively straightforward lines in terms of a dominant national culture, that of Scotland (and of Ireland, and to some extent also of Wales) must accommodate the consequences of the shifting relative minority status of its writers and citizens. The Act of Union that brought Scotland and Wales together with England in 1707 under the political umbrella of an ostensibly "United" Kingdom could go only so far to engineer anything like the genuine cultural melding that is implied by the nationalist title of Britain (and Britons). Indeed, recent initiatives in Scotland to reclaim full national political independence illustrate how fierce and ultimately ineradicable is the resistance to such political and cultural forced marriages, which are never egalitarian and companionate but instead unsteady, artificial arrangements in which violence, abuse, and rape play no small part, as the record of Britain's experience in Ireland has amply and tragically demonstrated.

By the Romantic period the Act of Union had been in place for three quarters of a century. Following the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1745 Scotland steered a steady course toward ever greater enfranchisement within Britain, to whose now combined culture Scottish intellectual, economic, and moral traditions contributed in increasingly significant ways. Many Scots saw in that larger national unit, in fact, great practical opportunities for personal advancement that made them less interested in clinging to sentimental ideas about Celtic origins and the desirability of absolute Scottish separatism. Indeed, especially by the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, as Linda Colley has written in Britons, "Scots . . . do not seem to have regarded themselves as stooges of English cultural hegemony. Far from succumbing helplessly to an alien identity imposed by others, in moving south they helped construct what being British was all about" (125). In Scotland, the literary culture reflected this political shift toward assimilation and participation in part in its greater emphasis on a formal Anglophone literature that reflected, on one hand, the dominant intellectual culture of aristocratic England and its literary heritage and, on the other, the intellectual heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment. It is not by accident that while there has long been something known as a "Scottish Enlightenment," the existence of a comparable and contemporaneous English Enlightenment has only recently been argued in compelling fashion (Porter). Scotland had for centuries, after all, been one of the world's great intellectual centers, and one immediate consequence had been a vigorous and diverse publishing industry. Moreover, for all their traditional sense of cultural difference, many Scots shared with their English compatriots an overarching anxiety about the threat posed to them all by "outside" forces, most notably France. Especially with the coming of the French Revolution, sentiment swung sharply in favor of unified "British" solidarity in the face of this clearly mortal danger. Scottish interests in politics, economics, science, and the arts, it became clear, were likely to be served best by a stronger union with England, and as Scots rose to ever greater prominence (and influence) within the national Establishment much of Scottish literature began to manifest signs both of "loyalist" sentiment and of a clearly "British" nationalism. Too often in traditional literary history the "mainstream" culture tends to be de-emphasized precisely because of its inherent conservatism and its adherence to what succeeding generations typically regard as politically incorrect (or at least unattractive) and reactionary principles. Yet this conservative ground is often that which is occupied by the majority, including the writers. The texts contained in the present archive reflect this strain of sentiment no less than they do the more politically and socially radical, and their presence here therefore helps to paint a more accurate picture of the cultural milieu of the Romantic period in Scotland.

At the same time, though, there remained powerful elements in Scottish culture — including its literature — that resisted assimilation precisely because of an entirely reasonable fear that in becoming "British," Scots would lose irretrievably what they considered to be their essential Scottishness. For many Scots, such thinking informed a proud — even defiant — recognition and celebration of Scotland's profoundly Celtic national origin. For them, the passion for both political and cultural independence implicit in this celebration was not to be snuffed out, even when it might at times be tempered for purposes of exigency. The omnipresence in Scottish thinking of the history of William Wallace, for example, whose death at the hands of the treacherous Scottish nobles elevated him to the status of mythic hero, was merely the most dramatic manifestation of how such beliefs persisted. Indeed, as Kirsteen McCue has written, when by the 1790s the physical threat posed by the Jacobites had all but vanished, "Jacobitism became the strongest outlet for Scottish national feeling" (64), an outlet that was especially apparent in the poetry and music of the period. Recent post-colonial theory has helped us to appreciate how a subaltern individual or people may subvert or repudiate its oppression not only by overt violent resistance but also — often more tellingly — through more subtle means of enculturation. That is, the oppressive power and authority of an alien presence (which may be an actual invader or occupier or, alternatively, a social, cultural, or ideological force) may be effectively countered at the level of everyday experience by the perpetuation among the oppressed or occupied subalterns of an indigenous cultural behavior that the occupying culture seeks to repress, overwrite, or extirpate entirely. In the case of Scottish literature, this indigenous culture is most clearly apparent in the vernacular, idiomatic tradition, as well as in the wholly Gaelic corpus, but it informs a large portion of the Anglophone literature as well.

Its overt linguistic differance marks Scottish vernacular poetry as undeniably different from the formal idiom of the mainstream Anglo-Scots literary culture, even when it does not presume to stand entirely outside it. As Agnes Mure Mackenzie observes, "alongside the courtly, highly literate and often only too literary verse there runs a voluminous stream of ‘folk’ literature, of uncommon force and vigour for the most part, and some of it of extraordinary beauty" (33-34). Central to this vernacular tradition, of course, are distinctively Scottish tales, legends, myths, and characters, as well as familiar historical episodes, all of which call attention to their essential Scottishness not just through their content but also through their form, including the language in which they are cast. To this tradition belong earlier poets like Allan Ramsey (1686-1758) and especially Robert Fergusson (1750-74), whose unnaturally short life deprived Scottish literature of the eighteenth century's most proficient vernacular male poet, an Edinburgh poet equally at home in city and countryside, and blessed with a remarkable ear for poetic language. It was, of course, Robert Burns (1759-96) who brought the vernacular tradition to its greatest prominence, despite the very considerable productivity and public reputation of numerous women poets of the period who also composed in the vernacular. At the same time, though, many Scottish poets wrote with equal facility in both idioms, as did Burns, and Scott after him, basing their selection of idiom on their intended audiences and in the process further underscoring this literary indicator of national cultural difference.

Eighteenth-century Anglo-Scots poetry frequently reflects the cultural ambivalence — indeed frequently a suspiciousness of displacement verging on xenophobia — of many Scots, who often feared (not without reason) that their cultural identity stood at risk of being swallowed up by a cosmopolitanism they viewed with some alarm, even though Scotland (and especially Edinburgh) had long enjoyed a reputation as a European rather than merely a "British" cultural center. Evidence of this cultural unease is visible in the experience of many of the Scots who migrated south to London in the eighteenth century only to find themselves in the uncomfortable position of outsiders, even when they sought deliberately to assimilate with the English culture. As A. M. Oliver remarks, for instance, "their speech was not English, but it was close enough to it to irritate rather than to endear" (120). The explanation, at least to the essayist for The Monthly Magazine for 1797, appeared simple enough: "the chief defect in the Scottish literature of this period was, that the Scots had in general ceased to write their own peculiar dialect, of which they were now ashamed, but had not yet learned to write genuine idiomatic English" ("Account" 358). Never noted themselves for their great toleration of cultural difference, the English denigrated and ostracized these would-be mainstream Augustans from the north, making them acutely self-conscious of the extent to which their hybrid Anglophone idiom was no longer wholly Scottish nor yet entirely English. Indeed, the cultural self-consciousness visible in much Scottish literature of the period may stem from what was widely regarded as an inherent competition between London and Edinburgh, the latter of which functioned after the Act of Union as both a national capital and a provincial cultural center, a point that bore clear significance to an emerging Scottish nationalism that was itself an inevitable consequence of the Act of Union.

In order to counteract the hostile and often resentful English attitudes and prejudices that confronted them, transplanted Scots in the south stuck together in loosely-connected enclaves, whether their occupations were commercial, economic, military, intellectual, or literary. And because they were skilled at their occupations, they tended to thrive despite the obstacles that came with this hostile environment, prospering in part because of their sheer hard work. As the same 1797 essayist put it with a flourish of hyperbole:

the Scots began to apply themselves to almost every branch of literature and science, with an ardour and a success which were to awaken a new emulation in their neighbours of England, and to make the Scottish rank with the Grecian, the Roman, the Italian, and the Gallic names, in the estimation of all the votaries of either profound or elegant learning. ("Account" 358) By the end of the century, there were sufficiently large numbers of well educated, well placed Scots within the British social, political, and intellectual infrastructure to ease the transition and advancement there of increasing numbers of their countrymen, an increasingly sore point among the English natives who found themselves threatened or actually displaced in the emerging meritocracy.

Paradoxically, the Act of Union that had "invented" a new national identity under the banner of "Britain" promoted a rhetoric that served the interests of those who advocated Scottish nationalism while at the same time it aided those who sought to join the mainstream English culture, for, as Colley notes, the most successful transplants were able to "reconcile their Scottish past with their English present by the expedient of regarding themselves as British" (125) This process of cultural acclimation and accommodation was reflected also in literature, where it seemed to many that Scottish poetry was moving away from the vernacular tradition and toward something ostensibly more "respectable" and "polite" — that is, something that resembled the sanctioned models of the putative dominant culture. By the time that the first Book of James Beattie's most famous poem, The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius, appeared in 1771, for instance, Scots poets were becoming more comfortable with the mainstream English idiom and poetic forms — and even experimenting with them — and were in the process abandoning the intellectual conservatism of didactic poetry for something new that would reach its first great flowering in the poetry of Walter Scott (1771-1832), which burst upon the scene in 1802 with the first edition of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and established itself firmly in 1805 with The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Here was a poetry that was decidedly "romantic" in nature: powerful, original writing that delighted in tale-telling, in superstition and legend, and in a finely detailed sense of name, place, and time, a poetry in which a rich texture of the exotic is generated both through the geographically and culturally specific names of characters, settings, and incidents, and through the comparative "wildness" of the narratives themselves.

Is there, then, a distinctively "Scottish" poetry to be discerned in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries? Certainly the vernacular tradition suggests one such poetry, especially when one goes beyond the surface level of the idiomatic language and into the distinct cultural heritage reflected in the poetry itself. Offering unfortunately impressionistic terminology in support of his thesis, L. M. Watt argued in 1912 that Scottish literature in general is characterized by five distinctive features: romanticism, patriotism, love, humor, and nature. These "telling and original chords" he attributes in various combination to Scots poets generally, noting that "great passions and pathos have welled out from all of them at sundry times and in divers manners" (18-19). Watt's formulation is in fact more helpful than its apparent fuzziness makes it seem at first to be. By "romanticism," for instance, he means the romance tradition, which extends back to Scotland's earliest Gaelic roots and which provides an important thread of cultural continuity in the form of a sort of "national tale." Running parallel is what Watt calls "patriotism" and what we may perhaps better understand to be that fierce Scottish nationalism that drives historical romances and lyric verse alike. This is that essential quality of "Scottishness" that suffuses literary works situated in unmistakably Scottish physical, psychological, ideological, and intellectual settings, reminding us at every point of their grounding in a specifically Scottish time, place, and culture; it is, in fact, characteristic of Scott's best known work, which is on the whole deeply patriotic without being merely jingoistic.

"Love" appears for Watt to involve not only the interpersonal romantic attachment one normally associates with the term but also filial bonding, a working-out at the level of the family and the community of the passionate attachment that figures also in one's relation to her or his Scottish national identity (again Scott provides a useful illustration of how this element permeates poems — and of course prose fiction — ostensibly devoted to other subjects altogether). "Nature," by extension, likewise involves the sense of a distinctively Scottish place, landscape, or setting (including internal setting), and of an equally distinctive and powerful relationship to that setting, that is fundamental to any specifically national cultural definition of literary works. "Humor," of course, takes many forms, from meticulous intellectual satire to broad physical comedy, and it operates at linguistic, intellectual, and dramatic levels. Moreover, it involves in this context an element of "inside-ness" particularly characteristic of Scottish (and Irish) humor, by which we are made to understand that both the Scottish characters in the literature and that literature's readers somehow know more than do the cultural "outsiders" (including outsider readers) who appear naive, innocent, and vulnerable to all manner of pranks and deceptions, both within the plots and at the level of the language itself. This latter feature, again, is characteristic of subaltern groups who are enabled through precisely these subversive varieties of humor to regain a measure of superiority over those who have overcome or oppressed them in other ways. Benedict Anderson has defined "nation" loosely but usefully as "an imagined political community" (x). It is in precisely this fashion that Scottish nationalism defines the nation in the aftermath of the Act of Union, and in which the literature (and other artifacts of culture from the most esoteric to the least) promotes a subversive, oppositional stance by advertising both overtly and covertly its differences from "Englishness."

Added to these distinguishing qualities would have to be also lyricism, which enriches both the Anglo-Scots and the vernacular poetic traditions. Burns, Scott, and James Hogg (1770-1835) were of course superlative lyricists, whether they adopted the sentimental mode or a more vigorous — even contentious — one, and in Anglo-Scots and vernacular forms alike. But so, too were Anne Hunter (whose lyrics were, remember, set to music by Franz Joseph Haydn) and, in a very different vein indeed, Isobel Pagan. This element of lyricism figures significantly also in the ballads of women poets. Dorothea Primrose Campbell (1794-1863) and the blind Christian Gray (b. 1772), for instance, both produced moving ballads on the subject of war's devastation upon families, while the songs of Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, were famous and widely admired even before their author's identity was known.

A historical overview of Scottish women's writing reveals the validity of a point made recently by Dorothy McMillan about the remarkable engagement with issues both "public" and "domestic" to be found in the work of Scottish women writers (including prose writers): . . . the balance of interest between the public and private spheres is peculiarly female. Women almost always take an interest, even if not a part, in public life and they write about that interest, while at the same time they are almost always:

committed to creating stable environments in which the public figures may relax and develop more complete senses of self: women provide the fabric of social cohesion. (xiv) Perhaps because of the roles historically assigned them by a gendered culture, women writers exhibit in their works a particular sensitivity to the relationship between the public and the private, the socio-political and the personal. Because so much of their experience historically depended on the stability and viability of the domestic sphere — on a "family" life, variously defined — women were placed in far greater jeopardy by real and even potential threats to that domestic unit, as happened most commonly during the era in the case of war, which led to the decimation of countless eighteenth- and nineteenth-century families when their male breadwinners were killed or incapacitated and the family units consequently impoverished or utterly destroyed. Of such histories of domestic tragedy Scottish literature — like that of Britain generally — provides numerous examples.

For all the progress that was made in the eighteenth century (on both sides of the border) toward a united and assimilated nationhood, the history of Anglo-Scottish relations in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries nevertheless furnishes numerous instances of disruption and devastation that are made even more poignant by the fact of their being played out within the nation itself, rather than as part of an international conflict like that with France or the American colonies. Mistrust, hostility, and outright violence had played a part in English-Scottish relations for centuries, and the eighteenth-century Jacobite risings and the recurrent English fears of invasion, like the characteristic contemptuous and violent treatment of Scots by English, served for many on both sides to exacerbate rather than to repair these sore relations. English resentment of the Highlanders' march on Derby in 1745, for instance, was matched by Scottish outrage over the apparently genocidal aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746. These political and cultural disruptions — and the tensions that underlie them — are played out as well within literature, a point that Donna Landry makes in connection with "the Scotch milkmaid," Janet Little, when she observes that in her texts "the cultural specificity of English imperialism is articulated with and against an emergent Scottish nationalism." A working-class poet herself, Little, Landry argues, draws in her work upon "the critical power of the socially marginal, who remain exorbitant to established literary conventions, but within the discourse of Romanticism will become increasingly conventionalized figures of more or less explicit social protest" (236-37). In Little's poetry — and in that of many of her female contemporaries on both sides of the border — the woman, the woman writer's voice, and the woman writer's poetry functions both as signified and as signifier: as "text" and as sign. Their poems, like their lives, become sites for enacting struggles that are being conducted also on the broader stage of culture as a whole. At the ground level of language, we need to appreciate, whether a poet elects to write in Scottish vernacular or standardized formal English is unavoidably an act at once aesthetic and political, no less so than is the choice of subject matter or ideological orientation. One is either working within a tradition or outside it, with or against what it represents and embodies.

The ongoing cultural ambivalences generated by the intra-national tensions of the eighteenth century feed the characteristic hard edge of Scottish poetry — including women's — of a literature that exhibits impulses that are at once assimilationist and oppositional, a literature that copes with the appearance of cultural nationhood as a United Kingdom without neglecting the glories and the grievances of an independent Scotland that refuses to be erased and assimilated. In many ways, this situation epitomizes that in which women have found themselves over the centuries as a dominant cultural and ideological establishment has pressed them to submerge their independence, their voices, their names, their selves to the persons and the interests of others. This is one reason why Scottish literature of the Romantic period, like women's literature generally and Scottish women's writing of that period in particular, so often discloses a powerfully subversive and oppositional character.

This electronic archive of poetry by women of the Romantic period undertakes to rectify the critical and cultural lacunae involving these poets by making available in electronic format a large collection of volumes of their poetry reproduced in their entirety rather than merely extracted. This archive affords an extensive view of women's poetry of the period. Not absolutely exhaustive, this archive nevertheless is both representative and characteristic. It includes authors — like Joanna Baillie, Anne Bannerman, and Anne Macvicar Grant — whose importance is no longer in dispute, and it re-introduces to a twenty-first-century readership authors whose names and works have been neglected or marginalized for the better part of two centuries or more. Among these latter are Anne Ross, Catherine Ward, and Christian Gray ("blind from her infancy"), who published more than one collection, as well as Janet Little ("the Scotch Milkmaid"), Susannah Hawkins, and Isobel Pagan, who are known to have published only a single volume. The editors' aim has been not to construct any sort of hierarchy of women poets or to establish any particular "screening mechanism" or editorial filter for the contemporary reader other than to provide complete texts of the various volumes and in the process let the words and the numbers make their own argument.

About the actual numbers of readers these poets enjoyed in their time it is of course difficult to speak with certainty in many instances. Even when volumes published by subscription permit us to count the number of subscribers, there is no guarantee that those subscribers actually read what they purchased. Often a subscription was largely an act of charity that bought the gratification of public acknowledgment for one's support of writers who might well be talented but who might equally well be merely indigent or afflicted. Some undeniable facts of publishing history do at least offer us some tentative guidance about readerships. Poets like Grant, for example, not only published multiple collections but also witnessed some of those volumes go through subsequent — sometimes altered and enlarged — editions. This suggests that their readerships were comparably extensive, a fact that is reflected too in the number of references (positive and negative) to their poetry in the works of their contemporaries, including the popular and literary press. Others published once and then disappeared from view.

In recovering the texts contained in this archive, the editors have attempted to provide materials for the ongoing reassessment of the Romantic literary landscape. This reassessment will require some considerable rethinking of the relation of Scottish women poets not only to their male contemporaries in Scotland but also to their contemporaries of both sexes in the British Isles and on the Continent, as well as to their sometimes surprisingly large audiences in America. The only criterion for inclusion in this initial edition of the electronic archive has had to do with genre. Specifically, the editors have excluded for the present poetry that is explicitly dramatic in form, in part for reasons having to do with the electronic encoding of the texts. The volumes contained here therefore represent principally lyric and discursive verse of the period, including narratives, ballads, scriptural paraphrases, and hymnology. The period is itself defined broadly rather than narrowly, in keeping with the general tendency of contemporary scholarship both on Romanticism generally and on women writers of the Romantic period specifically. The editors have adopted as general historical parameters for their selection of texts the dates offered by J. R. de J. Jackson's groundbreaking Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770-1835. These dates, or something very like them, have been widely adopted in the past decade by scholars (including anthologizers) and teachers to define a Romantic "period" in the British Isles, and in adopting them — however loosely — for this project the editors have aimed for consistency without sacrificing what is most distinct and distinguishing about the specifically Scottish poetry represented here.

Dates are notoriously misleading, however, and prone to an unfortunate systematizing that has led to academic fallacies like periodicity and canonicity that have justifiably come under fire in recent years both for their inadequacy and for their arbitrariness. Moreover, any convenient dating of British "Romanticism" runs afoul of certain biographical realities involved with both its traditional luminaries and its lesser known participants. Older paradigms of British Romanticism often posited a shorter period: from Blake's earliest publications around 1790, the emergence of Coleridge in the mid 1790s, and the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, until about the death in 1834 of Coleridge, who had survived the major male poets of the so-called "second generation" and who was himself survived until 1850 by William Wordsworth. But when one includes also the women poets (as well as the many men equally badly accommodated by that dating), these dates become wholly problematic. Many of the women were born earlier and were publishing earlier, in England and Scotland alike: Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), Mary Robinson (1758-1800), and Helen Maria Williams (1762-1827), for example, were actively publishing early in the 1780s. Likewise, many women associated with Romanticism continued to publish well into the 1840s. Moreover, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that while an identifiable Romantic ethos survives virtually until mid-century, the seeds of a demonstrably "Victorian" ideology, aesthetic, and cultural mindset had already been planted in Great Britain even before Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.

The editors have attempted to be inclusive rather than exclusive in their selection of authors to include. To the work of poets who were born in Scotland or who lived substantial portions of their lives there, therefore, is added that of Susanna Blamire (1747-1794). Blamire was born south of the border in Cumberland, near Carlisle, but wrote many songs in the Scottish dialect and set many tales (like "Stoklewath," arguably her finest poem) in the border counties; her poems, collected and edited half a century after her death, were published in Edinburgh (Blamire). At the same time, the editors have chosen not to include, for example, Janet Hamilton (1795-1873), since before the birth of her third child she composed fewer than twenty poems (all orally and dictated to an amanuensis, and all on narrowly religious subjects), electing to resume writing poetry only in 1854, which thus places the bulk of her work outside this archive's working parameters. Such editorial decisions notwithstanding, this archive contains the bulk of Scots women's poetry from the Romantic period, a body of work whose extent, variety, and vigor provide a rich field for the exploration of the readers, scholars, and teachers who will continue this work of recovery and reassessment.

1. The phrase is most notably that of Jerome J. McGann, whose important 1983 study (McGann) was one of the earliest calls for a reassessment not just of what we understand by the term "Romantic," but also of the nature and assumptions of the literary-critical activities by which scholars and others have attempted to understand the literature usually gathered — selectively — under the umbrella term, "Romantic."

2. For a preliminary sense of the names and numbers, see Jackson.

3. See also Brown, who writes that "women have been among the primary performers and consumers of the form," and that "gender — and more particularly, gendered life experiences — have had something to do with the choices of songs — both to know and to perform, as well as to hear" (51).

4. The poem was in fact translated into many languages and became the subject of many paintings and engravings — and even of several plays.

5. See Feldman 539-42; Bold.

6. See, for instance, Bhabha.

7. See also Landry, especially Chapter 6: "Other others: the marginality of cultural difference."

8. She wrote nearly a hundred songs based on traditional Scottish airs, publishing them under the pseudonym of "Mrs. Bogan of Bogan." Only after her death in 1845 was her identity revealed when her posthumous Lays from Strathearn was published in 1846.

9. On this theme in British women's writing during the Romantic period, see also Behrendt. Behrendt — Intro, p. 35

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