Poor, Dear, Unfortunate Jean.

 

 

It has been brought to my attention that the National Trust for Scotland is holding a Jean Armour Supper in Burns Cottage on 24th January. Presumably in case potential attendees are otherwise engaged on the Bard's actual birthday on the 25th. Tickets are £100 a pop, so it's only for 'those and such as those' as the locals would say. 

Back in 2016, I researched, wrote and published what was generally accepted to be the definitive book about Jean Armour, albeit in novel form  - The Jewel. It's still available, both in paperback and as an eBook, which you will find here. Until then, she had been a mere footnote in the life of the poet. In the historical note to my novel, I point out that 'too many Victorian scholars seem to have been content to maintain the fiction that in marrying Jean, a reasonably prosperous stonemason's daughter, the poet was somehow marrying beneath him.'  Catherine Carson went so far as to call her an 'unfeeling heifer'.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. 

The poet called her his muse, in this loveliest of songs - O Were I On Parnassus Hill - one that another poet would later dismiss as a 'strained and vapid lyric.' He should be so lucky as to have somebody write such splendid words about him. 

In spite of living some eight miles away from Burns Cottage, in spite of the fact that the Burns Museum sold my books, and I had actually done a talk for them - admittedly on a different subject - last year, I found out about the event only when it popped up on my FB feed and when a few people asked if I would be there. If there were invitations, one of them wasn't for me. But perhaps it's just as well. 

Here's the publicity for the event. Can you spot the problem? 

It’s time the ladies had their own supper! Celebrate the life, love, and legacy of Robert Burns through the eyes of his muse, Jean Armour.

So it's not about Jean at all, is it? It's about the life, love and legacy of her famous husband with Jean as an also-ran. A 'ladies' addendum to Burns night. Because we can't possibly celebrate this fine woman in her own right, can we?

Back when the book was first published, I attended a particularly wonderful Jean Armour Supper. It was held in Troon's Lochgreen Hotel, it was organised by the Ayrshire Business Women, and the only men in the room were the waiters. I toasted the Immortal Memory of Jean. It still stands out as one of the high points of my working life, one of the most enjoyable events I've ever participated in. 

I sometimes wonder if my big mistake was in writing Jean's story as a piece of fiction. Well, I don't regret it, because I am first and foremost a novelist, and I wanted to get inside her head. But I'm a historian as well, and everything in the novel either did happen or could have happened. Mostly the former. A little while ago, I found myself chatting to somebody on Facebook who had been doing some research on his family's own connection with Jean. Much of what he was saying was what I had discovered as well. When I innocently asked him if he had read my book, his reply was 'LOL no!' 

I'm still not sure what was so funny about the notion of reading a well researched, glowingly reviewed book, fiction or not, about the very topic you're researching.

All this is on my mind because, among other things, I'm currently working on a play about Jean, one that will involve dramatising parts of my own book. There's a definite likelihood of a production. And perhaps we can make it a celebration of Jean herself, without placing her firmly in the long shadow cast by her husband. Who after their marriage, and even though he had once called her his 'poor, dear, unfortunate Jean', always gave her her due. 

'Then come, sweet Muse, inspire my lay! 

For a' the lee-lang simmer's day, 

I couldna sing, I couldna say, 

How much, how dear, I love thee.'

Ellisland near Dumfries, where Jean is properly celebrated.

Immortal Memories: Robert Burns and Ellisland

When I wrote a stage play called Burns on the Solway, some years ago, I found myself as interested in the poet's wife as I was in him. Perhaps more so. Which probably explains why I eventually decided that I had to find out more about her. A lot more. And then I wrote a whole novel about her, called The Jewel, which was published by .Saraband, in 2016.

Since then, she has never quite left me, and at this time of the year in particular (25th January is the anniversary of the poet's birth) I'm often asked to speak about her or the poet, or their relationship.

This weekend, I'll be heading down to Dumfriesshire, to the farm called Ellisland, which is a particularly special place to be talking about the poet and his wife. I'll be giving the toast to the 'immortal memory' of the poet - and what better building to do it in than the house that Robert Burns built?

Well, mostly he supervised the building and worked on the farm. He had finally formalised his marriage to Jean in spring 1788 and had taken the tenancy of this farm on the bank of the beautiful River Nith, but there was no proper house on the site. So the poet took lodgings with an elderly couple in a smoky, chilly cottage while his house was being built. His landlord had given him money to fund it. Only he kept riding back over the hills to see Jean in Mauchine. He called it The Honeymoon and if the poems he wrote then are anything to go by, he was very much in love with her. It was a happy time for both of them.This meant that the building went slowly, and eventually he rented a draughty, but more civilised house somewhere nearby, so that he could move his little family to Dumfriesshire: Jean, his little son, Robbie, (the only surviving child of two sets of twins) his cousins whom he was planning to employ as farm servants, and a young maidservant. I'm sure Jean couldn't wait to get there, and neither can I!

Robert Burns's Magnificent Response to a Critic

I don't know how this had escaped my attention until this week - but it had: Robert Burns's incomparable response to a critic who had complained that his poetry contained 'obscure language' and 'imperfect grammar'.

I mean I've felt like this often enough - haven't we all? But I never had quite these words to express my feelings!


Ellisland, 1791.

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

R.B.

Ellisland

Poor, Dear, Unfortunate Jean

Jean Armour in old age, with her grand-daughter. 

I posted this recently on the Authors Electric blog (some very good stuff on there at the moment about the hideous new EU VAT rules - you can find it at this link) but thought it might be worth reblogging it here on my own blog - especially given how close we are to Burns Night

For the past nine months or so, I’ve been deep into research for a new novel – a fictional account of the life of Robert Burns’s longsuffering wife, Jean Armour. Or, ‘poor, dear, unfortunate Jean’ as the poet (often called ‘the Bard’ up here) described her in one of his more whiny and self absorbed letters. And for the past couple of months, I’ve also been writing the novel itself. Or trying to.

He had offered her marriage, she had agreed, then repented under pressure from her parents, especially her dad who is reported to have fainted clean away when he heard the news of the common law marriage. He thought Rob wasn’t good enough for his much loved daughter, and he may well have had a point. Very much miffed, the poet decided to cut his losses and leave Scotland. Only the success of his first publication prevented him from heading to the Indies where he would probably have fallen victim to some foreign fever. But even when he was being celebrated in Edinburgh, even when he was seeing other women and writing love poems to and about them, his references to Jean in his correspondence suggest that he couldn’t quite dislodge her from his affections, however hard he tried. And believe me, he tried.

I’ve had a soft spot for Jean for more years than I care to recall. I’ve written two plays about Rob Mossgiel as Burns sometimes called himself – Mossgiel being the name of the family farm, or the one they were currently renting, anyway. Both times, the plays turned out to be as much about Jean as they were about her husband. Interestingly, even nowadays in Ayrshire, farmers are often named after their farms. There used to be a Jim Grimmet who lived outside this village. Sometimes it’s just the farm name as applied to the man – Auchenairney, for instance.

The Bleach Green in Mauchline which figures in the tale of Jean and Robert.
Also said to be the site of the Elbow Tavern.
The old man is Sandy Marshall, born while Jean was still alive.

I already knew quite a bit about Jean, but I needed to know more. There is a vast amount of information about Robert out there but considerably less about his wife. This, I’ve decided, is because with a handful of welcome exceptions, most of the commentators past and present, academic and popular, have believed the fiction that in marrying Jean, a reasonably prosperous, property-owning stonemason’s daughter, he was somehow marrying beneath him. Thank goodness for Robert Crawford who in his excellent biography of the poet, The Bard, was not shy of expressing his opinion that Jean was too good for her husband. Besides, if Jean’s dad thought that the marriage was a non-starter, how much less welcome would the Bard have been as the strapped-for-cash, albeit not actually penniless, partner of some country gentleman’s daughter in a Scotland where the class divisions were much more strongly marked than they are now. And the divisions still do exist.

Mossgiel looking very much as it would have done in Burns's time

Jean may not have been a great reader although she was well able to read and write. Books were scarce, unless – like her husband – you went out of your way to beg, borrow or buy them. She certainly read his poems. She was a strong, healthy, good natured and intelligent young woman who was willing to learn what she needed to know to support her husband and her children. There is a kindliness about her, a sturdy and beautiful sense of morality that shines through all her actions. And a deeply attractive physicality. The more I know about her, the more I love her. 

She even went to Mossgiel to learn all about dairying from Rob’s mother and sisters, when her husband took a lease on a small farm called Ellisland, down in Dumfries and Galloway. 

Ellisland in Dumfriesshire. They moved here from Mauchline.

Little of her correspondence survives. There were a few letters written by other people on her behalf but these were mostly on matters of business or legality, when she was older. It’s clear that she was literate but unsure of herself when it came to the complexities of these matters. We have a clutch of letters from her sons when they were grown up or in their teens, living elsewhere, especially from a son who was studying in London and wrote her the kind of loving, begging letter with which all mothers will be familiar: ‘It’s great down here, but I need some clothes and a bit of cash.’ Well, perhaps not in those very words, but that kind of thing.

We don’t know what she wrote to her husband when they were apart because he didn’t think to keep any of it. We have a handful of letters and poems from him to her, touchingly domestic, extraordinarily loving. In fact it seems very odd to me that strings of academics have been blind to just how much he loved and relied on her. 

Jean's teapot.

‘My Dear Love, I received your kind letter with a pleasure which no letter but one from you could have given me – I dreamed of you the whole night last; but alas! I fear it will be three weeks yet ere I can hope for the happiness of seeing you. My harvest is going on. I have some to cut down still but I put in two stacks today, so I am as tired as a dog.’ 

He goes on to talk endearingly about sweet milk cheese, table linen and her new gowns. Real life. We know that when he did manage to come back to Mossgiel, she would walk out to meet him along the road. As you would. They were in their twenties, in love and in lust. 

Robert Burns: the handsome husband.

But although it’s easy to get a sense of her, it’s harder to find out the facts. There are objects, of course, and references to objects, and that’s what fascinates me most of all : a pretty teapot, a flower picture, a plate, a pair of spectacles, a beautiful gold and coral brooch, a fine china bowl with birds and roses, a corner cupboard, a kettle, a cookery book and a bonnet box. I love her stuff. There’s so much of the woman in there. But as I read all these books, past and present, in which she figures only as a bit player, a walk-on part, I realise that so many of these commentators and researchers despise the domesticity instead of asking themselves what this love of pretty things and nice clothes might tell us about Jean and her husband, who clearly liked them too and aspired to a certain level of comfort.

Jean's flower picture

Oh, and she could sing like a bird. She knew all the old songs and she sang them well. And since her husband was a song collector, the song collector of Scotland par excellence – that too has to count for something, doesn’t it? Burns Night, by the way, is on 25th January. Robert was born on that date in 1759 in a cottage in Alloway not far from the town of Ayr, and almost immediately, the chimney blew down in one of the winter storms that were commonplace in the West of Scotland and still are. There's one blowing up even as I write this in a house built only fifty years after the year of the poet's birth. Jean was younger than her husband, born on February 25th in 1765. 

Meanwhile, I wrestle with the elephant in the room, a large poet-sized elephant, an elephant that has assumed the status of myth, all things to all men. This is a novel about Jean. It will of necessity also be a novel about her famous husband. But the task of making it genuinely about Jean and not about ‘Rob through Jean’s eyes’ like everything else ever written, including my own plays on the subject – that’s the really tricky bit!

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Historical Fiction Five: Starting a New Project

Burns's walk at Ellisland

For the last of these posts on historical fiction, I want to say a bit about staring a new project. In the last few months I've been starting work on a new historical novel. Until a little while ago, I was in researching, (with some welcome assistance from Creative Scotland) but also very much in thinking and daydreaming mode. Gearing up to write but not quite there yet. Thinking, too, about the voice in which this story will be told. How to get into it. How to get inside the mind of the main character who is a real, historical person: Jean Armour, wife of the poet Robert Burns. 

And how to tell her story.

Once again, it’s about immersion. So it might be useful to some writers – and interesting to some readers – to hear about the kind of things I do when I’m getting started on a new project in parallel, of course, with all the necessary research. First I daydream, but then, I clear the decks, mentally and physically. In this case, it meant sorting out the study, the place where I work, which earlier this year was much too cluttered for comfort. I don’t mind clutter, but it has to be reasonably tidy clutter, so that I know where everything is, otherwise my brain can’t cope. I spent a couple of energetic weeks hauling down folders and files, sorting out drawers, disposing of some of my vast hoard of books and generally relieving some of the congestion. There is something very therapeutic in all kinds of ways, about this kind of process and I also find it very therapeutic where writing is concerned. I think we’re clearing mental (and perhaps even spiritual, if you’re that way inclined) spaces, making room for something new. Every time I take a bag or box of unwanted items to the charity shop or the saleroom, every time I make another trip to the recycling centre or list another few items on eBay, I wonder why I kept them for so long. What on earth were we keeping those very old, but not old enough to be interesting, computers and other pieces of electronic kit for? Why was I hanging onto so much out of date paperwork? Why was I keeping not very good paperbacks that I know for a fact I will never want to read again because I didn’t even finish them the first time round? I’m by no means minimalist by inclination, but sometimes you just have to let things go, and I generally find that when I do, I can breathe more easily, and the ideas just come flooding in.

But once I’ve done this, cleared the decks and the desk to make a new start, I surround myself with more stuff. Except that it has to be the right stuff. I’m looking for all kinds of things to help the process of immersion in a time and place. I find this works for all my fiction and even for plays, whether historical or contemporary. I go hunting for all kinds of things – images, artworks, photographs, some inspirational objects, and as much appropriate music as I can find. The music is important. Roz Morris hosts an excellent series of blog posts on the ‘soundtrack’ of various pieces of fiction and I always find that my fiction has a soundtrack. I may not listen to it when I’m writing. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I just want silence. Or as much silence as the jackdaws on the roof will allow me. But sometimes I need a soundtrack of appropriate music. With The Amber Heart it involved Polish folk music, Chopin, other composers. The Curiosity Cabinet and another novel, more contemporary, were both written to Scottish and Irish traditional music. Ice Dancing involved a steady beat of love songs interspersed with hockey songs: Queen, the Sugababes, Cher. The Physic Garden needed more traditional music and so will this new project, which is set in eighteenth century lowland Scotland.

Apart from the music, I’ve put up old pictures and postcards, surrounding my desk with them. And on this occasion, rather a lot of very old books which I seem to have managed to acquire over the past year, mainly on eBay. They aren’t in the greatest condition, which explains why I managed to buy them for a song. But a two hundred year old book – even when it’s a bit ragged around the edges – is a treasure when it comes to trying to immerse yourself in the past. You can imagine it new, pristine, beautiful. You can imagine the people who handled it, what they felt like, what their thoughts might have been. You can above all imagine their words. When I was writing the Physic Garden I had other things to look at, including a Georgian embroidered christening cape like the one in the book.

Ellisland Farm

I also try to spend time in the places where each novel is set, allowing myself plenty of time for daydreaming, plenty of time for impressions and ideas to come wandering in. Sometimes I take notes, but they’re very short, very cryptic. Sometimes I don’t even do that. As long as I’ve allowed myself the time, I know I can remember whenever I need to. In this instance, it meant spending time not just in Alloway, but - for example - at Ellisland where Jean and the poet lived for a while,  a magical place, as yet unspoiled by over-interpretation. Long may it continue.

The other thing I’ve been doing obsessively is setting up a ‘secret’ Pinterest board to which I’ve pinned all sorts of images that are connected with the topic of my book. I use Pinterest quite a lot, although it can form wonderful displacement activity, so you have to use it with care. It’s all too easy to find an appropriate image and then find yourself tracking back through all kinds of beautiful boards and their associated websites, intrigued and moved by the variety of images on display. Topic boards on Pinterest can also be useful for helping cover artists and even your publisher, if you have one, to understand your thoughts about the book, your sources of inspiration, how you ‘see’ it and consequently how it might be marketed and to whom. 

Jean in old age with her much loved grand-daughter.

If all of this sounds a bit like uber displacement activity, it’s probably because it is. My husband calls it ‘pencil sharpening.’ Starting a new project is scary. It’s a bit like standing on the edge of a swimming pool daring yourself to dive in. You distract yourself with all these ‘necessary’ preparations. But I’ve come to see, over the years, that there is a sense in which they are necessary. And a necessary parallel to the meatiness of the research that you also have to do. They get you in the right frame of mind. And with historical fiction in particular, they arm you to some extent against the curse of presentism I wrote about in an earlier post. They remind you of when and where you are meant to be when you’re writing. They are a little like the Wardrobe – the route to Narnia. 

When they work well, they’re a doorway to the past. 

Mossgiel near Mauchline as it was in the poet's time.

Ellisland: the long road to a new novel.

Ellisland Farm

Last week, we headed south to Ellisland, near Dumfries, the farm where Robert Burns and Jean Armour spent some three years of their early married life and where he composed - among other memorable poems - Tam O' Shanter. 

The last time I visited this place, I was very young. Even then, I was so 'into' Burns, a fascination that has never really left me, that I was always persuading my mum and dad to drive about the countryside, visiting places with connections to the poet. It helped that we lived within walking distance of Burns Cottage in Alloway and I would wend my way there on fine spring and summer Saturdays, always hoping to see a ghost or two. Rab remained obdurately unwilling to manifest himself, even for such a fan as me. 

Later, much later, I wrote a couple of plays about Burns: one for BBC R4 about the writing of Tam o' Shanter, notable mainly for a stunning performance of the poem from Liam Brennan as Burns, with Gerda Stevenson as Jean and an early appearance by Billy Boyd (of later hobbit fame) who was an absolute joy to work with and made everyone laugh. 

Later, I wrote a play for Glasgow's Oran Mor, about the last few weeks of the poet's life down on the Solway coast. But in both of these plays, Jean Armour, the poet's long-suffering wife, figured largely, her voice more or less demanding to be heard. (Much as William's voice would not be denied in The Physic Garden!) 

Ever since then, I've wanted to write a novel about Jean. Not a piece of non-fiction, although like all my historical fiction it'll be well researched. But I've had this longing to crawl inside Jean's head and try to write her story. You've only to read a few accounts of the poet's life to see how easy it seems to have been for academics to dismiss Jean as 'not quite worthy of the bard.' Creative Scotland, it seems, agrees with me, because they have just awarded me a very welcome sum of money to research the novel and here I am, at the start of a longish road to a new book. 

Donald Pirie and Clare Waugh as Rab and Jean

Anyway, I loved Ellisland. And I loved it not least because it hasn't been overly interpreted. It remains one of those atmospheric places where nobody has got their hands on the displays, nobody has introduced sound and light effects with a hundred buttons for kids to press, and nobody has tried to tell you what you ought to think and feel. 

I don't know how long the Trust in charge of Ellisland will resist the temptation to revamp it, so I'm very glad I saw it as it is. It was a very fine day, there were house martins flying and calling about the old buildings and the walk along the Nith, where Rab is said to have composed Tam, was a green, shady pathway, fringed with wild flowers, dappled with sunshine. The curator, who lives in the cottage, was knowledgeable and helpful, and the exhibits - oh the exhibits were to treasure: Burns's sword, Jean Armour's much mended 'mutch' and the poet's wooden box, hewn from a single log, with his initials on the top. 

This is how these small museums used to be and sometimes I find myself wondering what it is about them that I enjoy so much and what it is about the new museums that - splendid and well thought out as they are - so irritates me sometimes. I can only conclude that where there is too much explanation and interpretation, there is no room at all for imagination. You are always being told what to feel and what to think. 

One of the tricks to writing historical fiction is to do just enough research. But then, you give yourself permission to make things up. And only then do you find out what you don't know, what you actually need to know. So you go back and find some answers. But if you do too much research to begin with, if you dot all the 'i's and cross all the 't's there's a good chance that you won't want to make anything up at all. 

Ellisland is open to the public and it's magic. If you're a Burns enthusiast, go and see it while it's still in it's wonderfully welcoming state. If you're not a Burns enthusiast, you may well have changed your mind by the time you come away!