Editor's Note: Wrote verses at the age of 10. Educated in Latin and French. She championed the use of contemporary English, and thought women poets writing in Scotland should join Englishwomen and achieve greater fame through the use of standard English. She was the niece of Alison Cockburn, and wrote to Burns, who answered, but later disliked her "intrepidity of face and bold critical decision" (FCLE). Alonzo and Cora is written after a tale of "doomed interracial love" taken from Marmontel's book on the Incas.

Scot, Elizabeth Rutherford, 1729-1789

By Stephen C. Behrendt

Critical Essay

Much of what we know about Elizabeth Scot (whose name occasionally appears as Scott) comes from the anonymous editor of her one volume of poems, Alonzo and Cora, with Other Original Poems, Principally Elegiac, published posthumously in 1801. A native of Edinburgh whose early education included both Latin and French, Elizabeth Rutherford (1729-89) demonstrated an early interest in poetry; the editor's Preface tells us that she "wrote verses in her eleventh year" ([i]). Her apparently well placed family (her father was "Counsellor at Edinburgh" [i]) provided both resources and stimulation for their daughter, whose "genius," we are told, was "improved . . . by culture, and strengthened by study" ([i]). Among her mentors were Allen Ramsay (1686-1758; "with . . . whom the author lived in intimacy"; Monthly Magazine 658, Critical Review 230) and Thomas Blacklock (1721-91), the blind poet who "constantly mentioned Miss Rutherford as a writer, whose talents were superior, and whose poetry was deserving of praise" ([ii]). Later she corresponded with Robert Burns, having read his poems in manuscript through her aunt, Alison Rutherford Cockburn (1712-1794), who knew Burns (Blain 955); in 1788 they exchanged the lively letters in vernacular verse that appear at the end of her collection. Scot's editor reports that her finacé ("an IRISHMAN of distinction" [36n.]) drowned en route from Edinburgh to Ireland, and that this personal disaster "clouded her future prospects"; turning to poetry "to assuage the anguish of disappointment, and sooth her sorrows," we are told, "she exchanged the sprightly for the mournful Muse," which led her to prefer the elegiac mode ([iii], Blain 955). Late in her life she married Walter Scot, a country gentleman whose estate of Wauchope lay near Edinburgh ([iii-iv]).

It is clear that Scot took the poet's vocation seriously. The opening poem, "Scotia's Address to Her Sister Anglia," explores the double dilemma in which contemporary Scottish women poets found themselves professionally and aesthetically, handicapped as they were in their culture by their gender, on one hand, and by the inhibiting vernacular poetic tradition they therefore inherited, on the other. Addressing "Anglia" (who is both England and its poets), "Scotia" (who is both Scotland and Scottish poets - and most particularly Scot herself, as woman and as poet) observes:

In antique garb has SCOTIA's Muse too long
Disguis'd the sweetness of her native song:
Ev'n where her work the seal of genius bears,
The phrase uncouth disgusts your nicer ears. (1)

 In recent times Scottish verse has been distinguished, she notes, by the productions of poets like the militant Jacobite William Hamilton of Bangour (1704-54; contributor to Ramsey's Tea-Table Miscellany), the tragedian John Home (1724-1808; author of Douglas, The Siege of Aquileia, The Fatal Discovery, and Alfred), and James Beattie (1735-1803; author most notably of The Minstrel). Unfortunately, however,
no daughter yet of mine

Had dar'd to court the favour of the Nine,
While ENGLAND's fair distinguish'd hounor grace,
And high in Fame's bright temple claim a place:
When, in the stillness of a wild retreat,
Far, far, alas! from genius' favourite seat,
Where JED's fair stream his woody borders laves,
Or pours thro' flowery meads his chrystal waves,
Your votary rose; and, warm with generous flame,
Strove to secure the meed of honest fame;
To follow where your daughters lead the way,
Last of the train, and listen to their lay:
Her harsher lines attune from their smooth strain;
From their full wreaths one humble sprig obtain;
From dark oblivion's gulf her name to save;
Adorn her life, and dignify her grave. (2-3)

Placed as it is in the first position within the volume, this poem constitutes a manifesto, declaring Scot's overall aesthetic agenda and asserting her personal ambition to attain a reputation (both as a poet and as a woman poet) that would outlive her mortal life. Despite the conventional note of humility and self-deprecation in these lines, Scot reveals that she is attempting nothing less than to situate herself as the successor to James Thomson (1700-48), whose "cheerful morn of youth" was spent along the banks of the Jed (The Seasons; Autumn, ll. 889-91; Oliver, 124). In this capacity she proposes to move Scots poetry away from its familiar and longstanding vernacular tradition and toward the Anglophone model of Pope and Thomson, a step that will in her opinion inevitably both serve Scots poetry - and the Scottish literary tradition — and establish herself as the first important woman poet to work in this new and purer poetry. As J. H. Millar observed a century ago, "it is not surprising that, when to excel in the use of English and to eschew the Scots dialect became the mark of an enlightened mind and a cultivated taste, a considerable number of Scottish writers should have betaken themselves to verse as their form of literary expression" (370). And Scot was largely correct in her point about the failure, for the most part, of earlier Scottish women to distinguish themselves in this Anglophone strain of verse, for while predecessors like Lady Grizel Baillie (1665-1746), Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw (1677-1727), Alison Rutherford Cockburn, and Jean Elliot (1727-1805) had attained a measure of fame, it was largely within the parameters of vernacular verse.

The male poets whom Scot cites help to date both her poem and the apparent period of her greatest literary activity. Thomson, for instance, began publishing The Seasons in 1726 with Winter; A Poem, although the "complete" poem appeared first in 1730. But the others are later. Hamilton's Poems on Several Occasions, for instance, appeared in 1748, while Home's Douglas dates from 1755 and Beattie's The Minstrel was first published in 1771-74, following the appearance of his Original Poems and Translations in 1760. For that matter, her mentor Thomas Blacklock's Poems on Several Occasions dates from 1746. These dates suggest that "Scotia's Address" — and probably most of the other poems — date from well after 1750.

That Scot succeeded at least in part in her ambitious design is revealed in the praise of the Critical Review, whose critic observed of Alonzo and Cora that "we have here the satisfaction of meeting a poetess of no ordinary merit. . . . There is not a poem in the volume from which we could not quote with pleasure" (229-30). Such praise was anything but universal, however. The Poetical Register's brief response was mixed at best, saying that the title poem "though incorrect, and rather too long, is, on the whole, a pleasing composition." At the same time, it writes, "some of the smaller poems are marked by a tender melancholy which strongly interests the feelings" (434). Indeed, this latter point was made also in the British Critic, where we are told that "tenderness of sentiment, and fluency of versification, appear to form the general character of these Poems, rather than fertility of fancy, or a very nice selection of expression" (663). "Upon the whole," this review concludes, "these Poems, though they now and then exhibit a weak line, or an inaccurate expression, and display no great originality of genius, may be read with pleasure by the lovers of tender and harmonious poetry" (663). As we might expect of poems composed in the tradition of sentiment, in other words, "effect" tends to figure more largely than objective substance. But this perspective can be myopic, if not occasionally simply misguided.

The Monthly Review, for example, was decidedly less tolerant of occasional lapses of any sort, whether real or merely perceived, and it was especially unforgiving when the author was a woman. The gendered nature of the criticism is apparent immediately in the review, in a passage worth quoting entire:

From the short history of this lady, prefixed to her poems, and from the amiable spirit disclosed in her productions, we can entertain no doubt that Mrs. Scot was an interesting object to her friends: but the virtues of domestic life do not constitute the merit of a writer; and the slight verses now brought before the Public would have been more respectably stationed, had they still dwelt in a private bureau. (436) This response in fact misrepresents the editor's Preface, which stresses not Scot's amiable domesticity but, quite otherwise, her artistic ambitions, her dedication, and her personal reversals. Moreover, the review is both manipulative and condescending is its presentation of Scot's work, perhaps most strikingly in its conclusion. There, singling out a single line in the long sentimental ballad, "Edwin and Edith," the critic complains of the line that it "is not intelligible in point of grammar, and is totally indefensible as a rhyme," which leads him to conclude the review with an extended grumble: "it is surely incumbent on those who attempt poetical composition, to understand the leading principles of style in the language which they design to immortalize" (437).

These varied critical comments raise several significant issues. First, because Scot's volume did not appear until 1801, twelve years after her death, they constitute paradoxically "dated" responses to poems that stylistically, thematically, and intellectually belong to an earlier period. If it is true that Scot was composing verse as early as her eleventh year, for instance, then her career as a poet effectively began in 1740; its conclusion with her death in 1789 therefore situates much of her career more strictly in the Augustan than the Romantic era. Moreover, Scot's editor observes that she had fully intended for her poems to be published and that she had at the time of her death begun working with an unnamed literary friend to prepare them for the press; her death, along with the friend's relocation, truncated the process. At the very least, the revisions would therefore date from the 1780s, by which time poems by English contemporaries like Anna Seward, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith (with whose poetry Scot's has numerous affinities) were being published. In other words, Scot's literary production spans what we normally think of as the age of Sensibility, and so it is no surprise that her poetry - which is characterized (correctly) as both harmonious and tender (to use the British Critic's words [663]) - tilts strongly toward aesthetic and expressive features that we normally associate with sentiment and sensibility. Faulting her poems on this account as late as 1801, as occurred, therefore violates both literary (and intellectual) history and personal circumstance, something that happened with disappointing frequency to women writers in particular during the Romantic period.

Second, the critical denigration of her poetry involves a procedure that is not unique to the period and which continues notoriously into the twenty-first century: the tendency to fault a poet's work on account of what it is not, while simultaneously ignoring - or refusing to value - what it is. What Scot's poetry is, in fact, is a sophisticated and effectively detailed poetry that evidences its literary heritage (and its attendant poetic and aesthetic) while at the same time exploring the new and occasionally unexpected poetic opportunities offered by the subject matter. Scot's handling of sentiment - and of familiar themes like disappointed love ("Edwin and Edith"), war-blasted romance ("Celadon and Mira"), thoughts of self-destruction ("Solitude and Sadness"), and the inhospitable character of nature and society alike ("The Deserted Mansion") - reflects the familiar eighteenth-century ethos and poetic that informs the work of English contemporaries like Charlotte Smith (as in her hugely popular Elegiac Sonnets) in particular. But it also involves both a fineness and luxuriousness of detail (especially in long poems like "Alonzo and Cora" or "Edwin and Edith") that at once recalls poems like Thomson's The Seasons (1730 and subsequent editions) and anticipates later ones like Smith's Beachy Head (1807).

Furthermore, Scot's work often exhibits a remarkable power and sensuality, something that none of her published critics saw fit to note. These features are particularly apparent in the title poem, "Alonzo and Cora," which drew upon Les Incas, the 1777 novel about the Inca empire of Peru by Jean-François Marmontel (1723-1799) that also informed both Peru: A Poem, in Six Cantos (1784) by Helen Maria Williams (1761?-1827) and, later, Spanier in Peru (1795), the popular sentimental drama by August von Kotzebue (1761-1819). Scot's tragic tale of disastrous interracial and religiously forbidden love traces the history of Alonzo, a young Spaniard who repudiates the savagery of his peers in Mexico and retires to Peru, where he becomes an intimate of the Inca king, who embraces him as warrior, defender, and friend. He eventually becomes enamored of the "cloistered" vestal virgin Cora, knowing full well that to desire her is to offend the king. During a terrible nighttime storm, the terrified Cora encounters Alonzo in the forest, where they submit to their sexual desires and indulge their passion fully and frankly. Scot's descriptions of this and subsequent scenes of their physical and psychological passion are insightful, poetically lush, and really quite moving. Especially given that they occur in a long, multi-part poem constructed on the neoclassical model of rhymed couplets (and the standards of reserve and "decorum" we associate with such poems), these extended passages of sensually heightened detail strike a modern reader as extraordinary.

The tale itself brings with it all the trappings of sentimental drama, including Cora's harrowing death sentence, Alonzo's last-minute intervention to confess his part in her "sacrilege," the king's eloquent recantation and liberation of all remaining "virgins of the sun" (117), and the final catastrophe, in which the young lovers fall into one another's arms only for it all to be too much for Cora, who dies. But it is the tapestry of physical details and psychosexual insights that makes "Alonzo and Cora" much more than any mere rehearsal of familiar material from Marmontel.

As her editor hints, some of Scot's poetry is indeed both elegiac and melancholy in nature. The concluding lines of "The Shipwreck," for instance, which poem traces the demise in a shipwreck of two young women bound for India to marry and settle, typifies both this mood and the moral and philosophical resignation Scot seems to prescribe:

Alas! how impotent is feeble man,
The darken'd maze of Providence to scan!
All, all are born to suffer and complain,
The sad associates doom'd of grief and pain;
And, ere the sympathetic tear is spent,
We are ourselves the wretches we lament. (9)

This final line lends an unexpected poignancy and pathos to the poem and signals the extent to which Scot effectively inserts both her own situation and that of her readers into the moral or philosophical design of a number of her poems.

Since her anonymous editor calls attention both in the preface and the notes to two poems that are supposedly about the Irish fiancé whose death by drowning turned Scot's muse from a blithe to a mournful one, it is worth considering these poems, for what we find is not what we are led to expect. The first, "Absence Lamented," is a conventional poem of infatuation and spiritual dependence addressed to

. . . th' APOLLO who my song inspires,
And warms my breast with more than poets' fires;
For whom my numbers still are taught to flow,
And every line with artless rapture glow;
Whose praise alone with fond delight I hear,
Whose blame is all the censure that I fear. (22)

Deprived of his presence, the narrator figures herself as frozen at the opposite pole, forced to see "six slow months in cold and darkness roll" (23) until his much-anticipated return brings the heat and light that have been "absent so long, and oft in vain desir'd" (23).

The second poem about "Oran," however, is much more problematic. For one thing, although the editor adds to this poem a note explaining how Oran "is a fictitious name; under which our author meant to conceal the object of her affections" (36), the character of that name hardly seems a portrait of a fiancé. Characterized by a "cruel coldness" (36), he is indifferent to the narrator's impetuous, passionate commitment to doing all she can to please, and thus to win, him, even if it means renouncing the rest of the world: "Thy fond endearments more than all I priz'd, /And, if but ORAN lov'd, the world despis'd" (37). Her warmest desires are thwarted, however, and her love goes unreturned. Like the miser who is inconsolable when a shipwreck steals away the "darling casket" of all his wealth, she is comparably distraught by the loss of Oran, which is likewise figured in the trope of a shipwreck. Yet, as the poem's opening lines remind us, the shipwreck is a figure (in both instances), not a fact; she is not devastated by a lover's death but, rather, "dismay'd by hopeless love" (35). This fact is important for the poem's conclusion, which delivers a psychologically acute diagnosis of the situation of the narrator (and others like her) and of the psychopathology that induces the unwary to press themselves into dangerous self-abnegation and self-denial in pursuit of their elusive and unresponsive lovers:

If souls above with fond affection glow,
If spirits mingle in affairs below,
To me, kind heaven, one happy lot assign;
To guard my best-lov'd ORAN still be mine.
For ever near him let my soul preside,
Repel each danger, and each action guide;
Direct what path to shun, and what pursue;
From errour and from passion clear his view.
No distance then thy presence shall deny,
Nor shall this hated form offend thine eye;
But, veil'd in some soft mist of melting air,
Be still invisible, tho' ever near. (39; my emphases)

At moments like these, a reader is especially conscious of Scot's insight into human nature, for she clearly moves beyond the familiar conventions of sentimental writing and into an understanding of human psychology that is both complex and penetrating. Hence it does her - and her work - a disservice to read a poem like "The Lover's Complaint" in narrowly biographical terms, even did Oran's incompatibility with our expectation of the author's actual fiancé already incline us to reject such biographical readings as both incorrect and inadequate.

Several other notes about Scot's volume are in order, in conclusion. First, it is clear that she brings to her work a background in wide reading. In addition to the poets she names (including those with whom she was apparently personally familiar), her literary background includes Marmontel, Ovid's Epistles ("Leander and Hero" is noted as being "Imitated from Musæus" and an editorial note relates it also to an English translation by Francis Fawkes), and Paradise Lost (as is especially evident from the opening of "The Deserted Mansion," which poem also anticipates many poems on the loss of property and social standing written in the 1790s by poets like Wordsworth, Southey, Smith, and Robinson). Furthermore, poems like "Eleanora" reveal a solid grounding in English and Scottish history. In terms of form, Scot's preference for the ballad stanza for her more sentimental tales and the smoothly crafted rhymed couplets for her more "ambitious" poems testifies to the allegiance she declares immediately in "Scotia's Address" to the "art correct" with which "each polish'd period shines" in the neoclassical verse she privileges over the "antique garb" of so much of Scottish poetry (1-2). These two verse forms were in fact the favorites of the Scottish Augustans generally, who "nearly all write heroic and octosyllabic couplets and some form of ode or lyric" (Oliver, 147) while nevertheless exhibiting at least some willingness to experiment with form and technique. At the same time, however, Scot's rollicking verse letter to Burns, "The Guidwife of Waukhope-House to Robert Burns, the Airshire Bard, Feb. 1787," indicates that she could compose Scots vernacular verse with the best of them - Burns himself included, as his own verse reply attests.

Still, one must wonder just how Scot ultimately regarded her own poetry and the cost to her of pursuing her literary ambitions. That she began revising her work for publication indicates that even in her later years she retained her goal of leaving some substantial mark upon Scottish poetry. And yet she did not survive to see her project through, so that her reputation as a poet remained confined to a circle of friends and literary acquaintances, many of whom seem to have been well placed and some of whom praised her work publicly. In this respect, one cannot but wonder whether the most revealing poem in the entire volume of Alonzo and Cora is not the brief poem that appears between the volumes two longest productions, "Alonzo and Cora" and "Leander and Hero." This poem, "The Consolation," eerily anticipates the tone of Wordsworth's "Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower" at the same time it examines the inevitable conflict that besets both the woman seeking public social standing (however modest) and the writer who aspires to a degree of fame and influence that cannot be attained without its costs, its trials, and its reversals:

BLEST is the maid, and truly blest alone,
Who peacefully lives, unknowing and unknown.
For her the world displays no winning charms;
No love of conquest her fair bosom warms;
Within her breast no warring passion glows;
No anxious wish disturbs her fix'd repose;
No faithless lover fills her eyes with tears;
No haughty rival's fatal charms she fears;
No love neglected sinks her soul with shame;
She secret mourns no ill-requited flame.
Unmindful of her charms, however fair,
Unknown the pride of beauty, or the care;
Hid from the world, she shuns the public eye,
Like roses, that in deserts bloom and die.
In peace and ease she spends her happy days,
And fears no envy, as she courts no praise. (123)

Juxtaposed with "Scotia's Address," this poem may indeed reflect consolation, but it a rueful consolation at best, and one that hints at a bevy of disappointments both personal and public.

Works Cited

Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. London: B. T. Batsford, 1990.
British Critic 18 (December 1801): 663.
Critical Review, s. 2, 34 (February 1802): 229-30.
Millar, J. H. A Literary History of Scotland. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903.
Monthly Magazine, suppl. v. 13 (20 July 1802).
Monthly Review 38 (August 1802): 436-37.
Oliver, M. A. "The Scottish Augustans." Scottish Poetry: A Critical Survey. Ed. James Kinsley. London: Cassell and Co., 1955: 119-49.
Poetical Register 1 (1801): 434.
Scot, Elizabeth. Alonzo and Cora, with Other Original Poems, Principally Elegiac, to which are added Letters in Verse, by Blacklock and Burns. London: Rivington, Robinsons, Cadell and Davies, Egerton, and Faulder / Bath: Crutwell / York: Tessyman / Edinburgh: Creech, 1801.