Showing posts with label Jean Armour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jean Armour. Show all posts

There Was a Lad and all that

Happy birthday to Robert Burns who was born on this day, here in Ayrshire in 1759. I knew little about him when we moved up here in the early sixties, but I quickly became a fan. Over the years, I've written a radio play and then a stage play about him. But my biggest project was The Jewel, a novel about the poet's wife, Jean Armour, and a companion anthology called For Jean, Poems, Songs and Letters by Robert Burns for his wife. He called her The Jewel of them all, and so she was. But although the novel is a third person story (he said, she said)  it is nevertheless very much told from Jean's point of view, So of course, I too began to see the poet from his wife's point of view. 

And was equally charmed by him. 

Whenever I've done book events or talks about the novel, somebody in the audience - usually a woman - has asked me what I thought about him, and I've always had to confess that I reckon in Jean's shoes, I'd have fallen for him too. Hook, line and sinker. 

One of his most attractive qualities must have been his sense of humour. He made people laugh. He made women laugh. He genuinely seemed to like women, young, old and every age in between  - which for a man of his time was a fairly rare quality. If he had to fall in love to write a love poem - as he himself admitted - he also had many genuine friendships with women throughout his too short life. He had his faults, but my goodness he must have been attractive. 

Anyway - hope you've got your haggis and neeps and tatties for tonight. (I love Burns, but haggis, not so much!) - and perhaps a wee dram as well. 

Here's my very favourite version of Rab's song about himself, from the late, wonderful and much missed Andy M Stewart: Rantin Rovin Robin. 

There was a lad was born in Kyle,

But whatna day o' whatna style,

I doubt it's hardly worth the while

To be sae nice wi' Robin.


Chorus  - Robin was a rovin' boy,

Rantin', rovin', rantin', rovin',

Robin was a rovin' boy,

Rantin', rovin', Robin!


Our monarch's hindmost year but ane

Was five-and-twenty days begun

'Twas then a blast o' Janwar' win'

Blew hansel in on Robin.

Robin was etc


The gossip keekit in his loof,

Quo' scho, "Wha lives will see the proof,

This waly boy will be nae coof:

I think we'll ca' him Robin."

Robin was etc


"He'll hae misfortunes great an' sma',

But aye a heart aboon them a',

He'll be a credit till us a'-

We'll a' be proud o' Robin."

Robin was, etc


"But sure as three times three mak nine,

I see by ilka score and line,

This chap will dearly like our kin,

So leeze me on thee! Robin."

Robin was, etc


"Guid faith," quo', scho, "I doubt you gar

The bonie lasses lie aspar;

But twenty fauts ye may hae waur

So blessins on thee! Robin."

Robin was, etc




Spooks Week: The Real Jean Armour

 

19th century ivory miniature of Robert Burns

I've written so much about Robert Burns that you'd think I'd have seen his ghost by now, but I never have. I suspect if I did see him, he would look nothing like the above romanticised image, although as a young man he was described as very dark and 'spare' - slim without being skinny - with fine dark eyes. He liked to dress fashionably when he could, so I reckon he'd have been an attractive young man. His wife Jean Armour certainly thought so.

Even before I knew much about her, I had a soft spot for Jean. I thought she had been hugely neglected over the years by later commentators. Catherine Carswell, in her biographical novel of Burns described her outrageously as a 'young heifer' while even the present day Burns organisations never seem to make much of a connection between the wee song bird on his self designed seal, with the motto 'wood notes wild' - a phrase he always associated with the wife he loved. She had the finest singing voice in the district. 

I've never seen Jean's ghost either, although I would have been very happy to meet her. I think she was a woman of great character, with a wonderful sense of humour. However, something happened when I was researching my novel about her, The Jewel, that certainly gave me pause for thought.

I had been researching Jean, her milieu, her marriage, her life story, for a long time before I ever plunged into writing The Jewel. That's the way it works for me. I try to immerse myself in a time and place for as much as a year beforehand (sometimes more) and then when I get down to telling the story, I'll find out even more things that I didn't know I didn't know, and have to research those too. It's absorbing but exhausting. 

For a time, it seemed as though there was nothing but Jean Armour in this old house which, when you think about it, would have been built while Jean was still alive. She died in 1834.

One night, my husband had got up to go to the loo. It adjoins the room I use as my office, just off our bedroom. I woke up too, as you do, so I saw him come back through the bedroom door, halt for a moment or two, say 'oh!' in a puzzled tone of voice, and then get back into bed. 

'What's the matter?' I asked. 

'I could have sworn I saw a woman standing in the doorway,' he said. 'At first I thought it might be you, but she was wearing strange clothes, a long skirt, a shawl, a cap on her head.' 

'The following morning, I showed him a picture of Jean Armour. 'That's her' he said.

I must admit I was a bit sad that I hadn't seen her myself. But we were immersed in her, so perhaps it's not surprising that my 'thought forms' had suddenly become visible to my poor husband! It's maybe just as well I don't write horror stories ... yet. 


Jean and I


Loving Ayrshire


 

It's no secret that I love Ayrshire. We moved from Leeds, years ago, when I was twelve, and my biochemist father got a job in a research institute here. I never enjoyed school much, even though I did quite well academically - but I adored the countryside and history of this lush, green and, let's face it, rainy county. If you can put up with the rain, it's considerably warmer than the rest of Scotland, and warmer than much of Northern England. Winters are much milder than in my native Leeds. 

Holidaymakers tend to pass it by in the mad rush for the Highlands, but the scenery is spectacular and the history is fascinating. Not surprisingly then, it has featured in at least some of my fiction, in novels such as The Jewel and Ice Dancing, as well as in many of the radio plays I used to write, notably a couple of series: The Peggers and the Creelers and Running Before the Wind. I'm planning a new series of novels even as I write this, and guess where they are mostly going to be set? 

I was happy to be asked to record a reading for this year's Tidelines Festival and chose a passage from the Jewel, about an early encounter between our very own Robert Burns and the woman who was destined to become his wife, and who was quite clearly the love of his life: Jean Armour. I didn't much want to record myself just sitting on a rock reading and my tech skills weren't up to recording myself walking and reading on a smartphone - so I included a sheaf of my own pictures of Ayrshire, as well as some lovely watercolour images from a Victorian artist called Janet Muir, who lived in Mauchline. Nice to see that the person putting the video together worked a bit of magic on them all. 

Anyway - here it is. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and watch the whole Love Ayrshire video. You'll find me, and a sheaf of other Ayrshire writers too. 

The Death of Scotland's Greatest Poet, Robert Burns: 21st July 1796

 


225 years ago, on this day, 21st July, in 1796, Robert Burns died at his home in Dumfries. He had been growing increasingly ill for months. On the advice of his doctors he had spent his last weeks wading out into the chilly waters of the Solway in hopes of a cure. In all likelihood, he was suffering from acute endocarditis. This was a condition which may have been chronic for many years, but which had possibly been triggered into an acute and deadly phase by a severe tooth infection. The sea bathing only hastened the inevitable end. He was terminally ill, desperately worried about his wife and children, and about small debts that any one of his friends would have paid, but that were obviously looming large for him in his weakened state. He was thirty seven years old. 

When I was writing my novel about his wife, Jean Armour: the Jewel, this was one of the hardest passages to tackle. By that time, I felt I knew the poet and his wife very well, and loved them both. I frequently found myself in tears as I tried to describe his final illness. If you would like to read more, you'll find the novel available as an eBook on all platforms, and in paperback, online and in various bookshops. There's lots of useful information on my publisher's website, here

Meanwhile, it seems a good time to post my description of the last days and minutes of the life of Scotland's greatest poet. 

'He sent a flurry of terrible, panic stricken letters: to James, (his father in law) to an unresponsive Frances Dunlop, to Gilbert, to his cousin in Montrose, James Burness, asking for money to pay the haberdasher. He wrote to Mr Thomson in Edinburgh, with the same plea. Both Thomson and Burness readily arranged for money to be forwarded, said later that they had had no idea how ill he really was, but it all came much too late. Although he had been ailing for some time, the slide into acute illness happened so quickly that it seemed to take all of them except those closest to him by surprise. He wrote to Jean, in Dumfries. He said that the sea bathing had eased his pains but he could eat nothing. He told her he was glad that Jessie was beside her, helping her.

He called her his dearest love.
 
He had to borrow a gig to bring him home ... There was a farmer in Locharwoods, John Clark, who lent him his gig, with a fine gentry horse to pull it, and a man to drive it. He could not have ridden by himself. His landlady ...  had persuaded the farmer that it would be a good thing to do and that he would be remembered afterwards for his kindness to the great poet in his last days.
    Rab could barely step down from the gig when he arrived home. He was all wrapped up in his plaid, although it was high summer. They had to stop at the bottom of the Mill Vennel that was much too steep for the horse. There had been a shower of rain, and the cobbles were slippery. His face was grey from the pain of the journey. He couldn’t stand upright and Jessie, the lass who was helping Jean in the house, had to go out and oxter him in. He was muttering that he was worried about his papers, his poems. He still fretted that he had left indifferent pieces behind and they would be thrust upon the world when he was gone, with all their imperfections still upon them.
    They were shocked by the deterioration in him, but Jean most of all. She gazed at him and thought that her heart would break. He looked skeletal, shook and shivered, and seemed in even more pain than when he had left. They put him to bed, and there he stayed, slipping in and out of sleep, or delirium, or both, it was hard to tell, and whenever he slept, they feared that he would never wake again.
    Once, he came to himself abruptly and said, ‘Don’t let the Awkward Squad fire over me!’ to Jessie’s brother, John Lewars, who was watching at his bedside.
    He meant the Dumfries volunteers, of course, few of them very efficient or soldierly. And John reassured him that they would not, but of course, they did.
    Jean nursed him as best she could, determined to see her man out of the world, if it was God’s will that he should go. But she would not have been able to do it without Jessie’s help. Jean could and did sing to him, quietly, as she had sung to all their children, and her voice seemed to soothe him.
    Very early on the morning of 21st July, she had been dozing in a chair, so far advanced in her pregnancy that she could not comfortably fall asleep. The child was kicking and tumbling inside her, as it did whenever she rested. Jessie had come in with his medicine, and tried to hold the cup to his chapped lips, tried to rouse him a little, but he pushed it away. His face was so thin now that he looked all unlike himself. Even his nose seemed to have become finer, sharper.
    Jean got up, steadying herself on the arm of the chair, and took the cup from Jessie. 
    ‘Rab, my dear, you need to take your medicine. It’ll do you some good, ease the pain, if you can only try to swallow it.’
    She sat on the edge of the bed, stroked his forehead gently, stroked the dark hair, shot through with grey. Suddenly, she had the strangest feeling, as though this was all unreal, as though there might be some magical place where she could turn back time, make it all different, if only she could get to it, if only she could reach it. There, he would be as she had known him at first: her strong, young lover, her husband, her man.
    He woke at the sound of her voice, or perhaps her familiar touch, gazed at her, raised his head and drank a mouthful of the cordial, coughing at the bitter taste of it. He tried to say her name, recognition in his eyes for an instant, reached out his arms to her and then fell back on the bed.
   ‘Oh Jeany,’ said Jessie Lewars. ‘Oh dear Jeany, I think he’s gone.’ 
     She was right.'

Happy Birthday, Rab

 




I'm reblogging this post - with a few changes - from 2016, when the Jewel, my novel about the poet's wife, Jean Armour, was first published by Saraband. After all, it's the right time of year, even if the only Burns Suppers we'll be attending will be online. I never thought I would miss book events as much as I do but I miss meals with friends even more, and that's what a Burns Supper is, after all - a meal with good friends. And poetry. And song. Mind you, it's probably my least favourite meal of the year, given that the only parts of the menu I like are the oatcakes and cheese at the end. 

After many conversations about Jean and Robert Burns, with individuals and groups, I’ve realised that some misconceptions about the poet are still very much in existance. These are beliefs I thought had been disproved by more distinguished academics than me years ago.

So many people have repeated the notion that Burns was a drunkard. He wasn’t, but it goes back a long way. A mean spirited Dumfries draper called William Grierson attended his funeral and wrote that the poet was ‘of too easy and accommodating a temper, which often involved him in scenes of dissipation and intoxication, which by slow degrees impaired his health and at last totally ruined his constitution.’ 

Well, he was as fond of a drink as the next man, at a time when the next man often consumed a  prodigious amount of alcohol, the gentry even more than the poor. Partly this was because in the cities at least – less so in the countryside where many houses would have a well – fresh water was at a premium and it could be safer to drink ale, although ‘small ale’ contained very little alcohol. 

Actually, Rab was probably less inclined to overindulge in hard liquor than most, although he certainly had his moments. But when you look at the body of work he produced, alongside a vast amount of clever, entertaining, thought provoking correspondence, as well as hard physical work, first as a farmer and then as an exciseman, riding some 200 miles each week, winter and summer alike – and being a loving father to a great number of children - you can see that the occasional spree is much more likely than any persistent problem. 

He was a social drinker on high days and holidays. He also thought the odd ‘session’ contributed to his creativity, as perhaps it did. He was sometimes led astray by wealthy men who ought to have known better. And during his last grave illness, alcohol seems to have given him some slight relief, if only as a painkiller. But it wasn’t what killed him. 

He didn’t die of the drink, and he didn’t die of consumption either. The evidence seems to point to a diagnosis of endocarditis: chronic, although not necessarily fatal, inflammation of the heart muscle. This would certainly have been a challenge to a constitution already weakened by rheumatic fever in his youth. Here too was a man who was involved in hard physical work in all weathers.

In Dumfries, his health already deteriorating, he developed a painful tooth abscess, and it’s now thought that the resulting massive infection could have been enough to trigger acute endocarditis. He became gravely ill, with all the symptoms of that painful condition, and died the following summer. During his last few weeks, with his illness exacerbated by the 'cure' of seabathing in the chilly waters of the Solway, he seems to have been able to eat nothing. Milk mixed with a little port wine was all that gave him any relief. But the ‘flying gout’ diagnosed by the doctors of the time was only a way of describing the dreadful widespread pains that must have beset his attenuated body during his last few weeks. 

I’ve been asked more than once if I thought Rab was a violent man. Well, I reckon he was a lover not a fighter. Fond of fishing, he was no fan of shooting and once took a neighbour to task for wounding a hare on the borders of his land (and wrote a scathing poem about it afterwards). He loved his children and was happy to work with them playing around his feet. Not for him the retreat to the study and the writerly hush. He was by all accounts an indulgent father who appreciated a little mischief. 

He was, nevertheless, a man of significant presence, physical and intellectual. He was a better friend than an enemy and was known to threaten to ‘skewer in verse’ anyone who overstepped the mark, like the Celtic bards of old. But his reputation was always for non-violence, for tolerance and good humour and there is no evidence that he was violent towards any of the women with whom he was associated. 

Except for one notorious occasion.

Who knows just what went on with Jean in the stable in Mauchline when the couple were at their lowest ebb? Was it overwhelming passion or something verging on rape? We have Burns’s own version in a letter to a friend, bragging about a coupling he had persuaded himself Jean enjoyed as much as he did. But Rab was a chameleon and could write what he thought might most impress an individual correspondent. We would know nothing about this episode if the poet hadn’t chosen to brag about it himself. 

We know that Jean was struggling with a mass of intractable emotional problems, not least a second unwanted pregnancy, and she went into labour very soon after the incident. She undoubtedly loved this man but she can't have been anything but shocked and hurt by his behaviour. We also sense that the poet was ashamed of himself, in spite of the bragging letter. He was the son of a highly moral father, and it seems significant to me that during this second pregnancy, with Rab in Edinburgh, Jean had taken refuge near Tarbolton with the family of Willie Muir, a friend of Burns senior, as much if not more than Rab and the Armours. 

The tension between desire – theirs was clearly an intense mutual physical attraction – and Jean’s obvious vulnerability presented me with some problems as a novelist. All the same, I suspect my interpretation of events may be closer to the complicated truth than the poet’s version. May be closer to Jean's perception of it as well. 

Finally we should remember that we are reading and writing about an 18th century man. Very different times, and not always comfortable to contemplate, but we can't rewrite history or historical attitudes to suit our own sensibilities. Laddish he may have been, but the term 'sex pest' belongs in 21st century tabloids. 

For his time at least, the poet’s ability to project himself into the minds of the ‘lassies’ – to defend them and appreciate them and befriend them, older women as well as young  – is one of the things that most endeared him to me when I was writing the Jewel. 

I suspect Jean loved him for it too.


On 21st July 1796, Robert Burns Died in Dumfries.




Very early on the morning of 21st July, she had been dozing in a chair, so far advanced in her pregnancy that she could not comfortably fall asleep. The child was kicking and tumbling inside her, as it did whenever she rested. Jessie had come in with his medicine and tried to hold the cup to his chapped lips, tried to rouse him a little, but he pushed it away. His face was so thin now that he looked all unlike himself. Even his nose seemed to have become finer, sharper.
     Jean got up, steadying herself on the arm of the chair, and took the cup from Jessie. 'Rab, my dear, you need to take your medicine. It'll do you some good, ease the pain, if you can only try to swallow it.'
    She sat on the edge of the bed, stroked his forehead gently, stroked the dark hair shot through with grey. Suddenly she had the strangest feeling, as though this was all unreal, as though there might be some magical place where she could turn back time, make it all different, if only she could get to it, if only she could reach it. There, he would be as she had known him at first: her strong, young lover, her husband, her man.
    He woke at the sound of her voice, or perhaps her familiar touch, gazed at her, raised his head and drank a mouthful of the cordial, coughing at the bitter taste of it. He tried to say her name, recognition in his eyes for an instant, reached out his arms to her and then fell back on the bed.
    'Oh Jeany,' said Jessie Lewars. 'Oh dear Jeany, I think he's gone.'
    She was right.




On this day, 21st July, in 1796, Robert Burns died, probably from acute endocarditis, of which he had all the symptoms. 

You can read more about Rab and his dear Jean in my novel The Jewel of which the above is an extract. 

The Jewel - Some Discussion Questions about Jean Armour and Robert Burns



With the anniversary of the poet's death coming up on 21st July, I've been thinking about some discussion prompts and questions for book  or reading groups. I know that many of my friends have been taking part in online discussion groups during lockdown, and I think it's possible that people in particular may decide to carry on with at least some of these get-togethers in the 'new normal' - even though nothing quite beats personal interaction and debate.

Anyway, here are a few questions that you might like to ponder, either for a group discussion, or even if you want to think about what you've read and perhaps do your own research in the future.

1 In her 1930 biographical novel about Burns, Catherine Carswell described Jean as a ‘homely and hearty' and 'a heifer’. Do you think she was right? How did your view of Jean (if you had one) change as you read the novel?

2 Why do you think that a pregnant Jean felt that she must go to Paisley when her parents forced her? What was it like for women at the time? What kind of resources would she have had?

3 Why do you think Burns got so very angry with Jean for her supposed ‘betrayal’ of him. What does that tell us about his feelings for her and his mental state at the time?

4 The so called ‘horse litter scene’ is very controversial now, especially given that Burns wrote about it quite graphically to a male friend afterwards. It was very hard to tackle in the book. What did you feel about it, and were you able to imagine yourself back to that time? Did you believe his subsequent bragging, or do you think he was feeling guilty about it and trying to justify himself?

5 The poet was, by all accounts, a ‘hands on’ and loving father. It is clear that a great many babies in rural Scotland were born out of wedlock at that time, and that the Kirk’s main aim was to get fathers to acknowledge and support their babies – a kind of social control that was actually quite good for mothers and children. Why do you think all this changed during the Industrial Revolution, so that for working women, pregnancy outside marriage was seen as disastrous?

6 When the Mauchline minister ‘Daddie Auld’ wrote that it is ‘aye the poor who maintain the poor in this parish’ what do you think he meant? What does it tell us about him? What do you think the author felt about him?

7 Highland Mary was much lauded by the Victorians. Why? Some of this still spills over into the present day, yet the evidence is that she wasn’t quite as saintly as later commentators and the poet himself made her out to be. What was it that was so appealing about her?

8 How do you think Jean contributed to Burns’s work, and do you feel this comes over in the book?

9 Did you get angry with Burns while reading the novel, or did you manage to maintain a soft spot for him? Did you understand why Jean fell for him? Do you think that if you were an 18th century woman, you would have felt the same? Were you aware of his charm across all these years?

10 Jean continued to lead a very full and contented life for many years after the poet’s death. She even had tea with Clarinda. She had several offers of marriage. Why do you think she turned them all down?


You can buy a copy of The Jewel here.

Willie's Mill, at Tarbolton, where Jean spent part of her second pregnancy.

Robert Burns's Funeral, 25th July 1796.

On this day, in 1796, Scottish poet Robert Burns, who had died only a few days earlier in his Dumfries home, was buried. He had struggled to return from Brow Well on the Solway, where he had been taking a 'water cure' that can only have hastened his end from acute endocarditis. Once home, he had to be 'oxtered' into the house, where he took to his bed and never left it again.

The funeral was a very grand affair at mid-day at St Michael's Kirkyard, in Dumfries. As a member of the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, he was given a military funeral, thus ignoring one of his last wishes. 'Don't let the awkward squad fire over me,' he had said, but they did it anyway.

While her husband was being buried, his wife Jean was giving birth to his last child, Maxwell.

I wrote about it in my novel: The Jewel, published by Saraband.


'On the morning of the funeral, before she could even dress, her pains began. It was clear that she could not leave the house. An hour after they had come to carry Rab away, her waters broke, streaming onto the stone floor. She went into labour and gave birth to his last son, Maxwell, on the same day. Few people perceived or even cared how terrible that was for her: to be in such pain and distress at that time. Jessie perhaps, although Jessie had no weans of her own yet. Mary Armour might have offered her some comfort, but Mary was in Fife and word had only just reached her. Rab's heartbroken mother would know what she was feeling. Nobody else. No man would have fully understood the darkness that engulfed her during the hours that she laboured for love of him on such a day. 

Jean told only a few people that the night after the funeral, as she lay in their bed, wrapped up in blankets, aching for the warmth of her husband's body beside her, with the shape of his head in the pillow still, and a few dark hairs attached to it, he had come to her. The whole house was quiet, Maxwell swaddled in her arms. She had been singing to the new wean until he slept, and she saw Rab coming into the room. He was as bold and clear as though he had still been in life and, she thought, rather more healthy than the last time she had laid eyes on him, a gleam in his eye and a flush of sunlight on his cheek. 

She was not afraid.

When had she ever been afraid of him except just that one time, in the stable, in the Back Causeway? Rather she felt the wee bubble of laughter that she had so often felt with him, laughter even in the most serious of situations, at the general absurdity of everything, even the very worst of things. She looked up at him while he gazed down at her and, in particular she thought, at the  baby. Well, why not? He had aye loved the weans best, loved the curve of their cheeks, the soft, vulnerable place at the back of the neck, their perfect wee fingers and toes. Then he shook his head sadly, as though regretting that he could not stay, and disappeared, so suddenly that it seemed like a snowflake, melting away in your hand.'





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!






Sex Pest? Robert Burns? I don't think so!

Sex Pest?
Over the past few days, some of our newspapers have been touting the notion that Robert Burns was a 'sex pest'. Quite apart from the stunning lack of historical perspective displayed, the comparison seems peculiarly invidious to me. And here's why.

First of all, the poet had a great many well documented, close but largely platonic friendships with women of all ages. To be fair, he probably wished some of them were more than platonic, especially when the woman in question was young and pretty. But there's little evidence that he forced himself on anyone who wasn't willing and - a rare quality in an eighteenth century man - he seemed happy to write in the character of a woman in the songs he wrote himself as well as those like this one that he collected, here in an incomparable performance from the late Andy M Stewart.

Jean Armour's abiding affection for her husband.
To label as rape the encounter with Jean Armour described in the notorious 'horse litter letter' is to deliberately over-simplify a relationship of great complexity.  So complex and dramatic, in fact, that I wrote a novel about it: The Jewel, published to critical acclaim by Saraband in 2016. I've spent years researching Jean, who has been neglected not to say denigrated by many Burns's biographers. Even Catherine Carswell, who might have been expected to have some sympathy, dismissed her as an illiterate and 'unfeeling heifer'.

Portrait thought to be of Jean in middle age,
by John Moir, courtesy of Rozelle House, Ayr.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. The more I discovered about Jean, the more I found to love. She emerges from a morass of small and often neglected but vital references, pieced together bit by careful bit, as a woman of strength and wisdom, with an abiding affection for her husband.

Disapproving parents and an impatient lover.
In 1786 the poet had offered Jean marriage and then taken her hesitation for rejection. She had little choice in the matter. She was pregnant. With, as it turned out, twins. Her father had torn up the marriage contract and whisked her away to relatives in Paisley. She found herself trying to please both disapproving parents and an impatient lover, a dilemma which would cause family tensions even today.

Burns wrote a string of angry poems and letters. Never man loved or rather adored a woman more than I did her, and to confess a truth between you and me, I do still love her to distraction after all, though I won't tell her so if I were to see her, which I don't want to do. He could self dramatise as much as the next young man - 'hopeless, comfortless I'll mourn a faithless woman's broken vow!' he wrote, but beneath the exaggerated lines runs a deep vein of genuine passion: a prolonged howl of outrage, grief, hurt pride and thwarted desire.

Mossgiel as it once was.

A fond father.
He was driven half mad with it. He may have courted Highland Mary on the rebound, but Edinburgh and potential fame called and that ultimately tragic relationship was short-lived. Meanwhile, Jean's babies were born. Rab was always a fond father and, once weaned, the boy, Robert, went to Mossgiel to be brought up by the poet's mother and sisters while the girl, Jean, stayed with her mother and grandparents along the road in Mauchline.

The relationship was still fraught.

In Edinburgh, Burns met pretty Nancy McLehose. They corresponded under daft pastoral names. The whole Clarinda -Sylvander episode seems to most grown women like an exercise in (almost certainly thwarted) seduction, by means of overheated letters and the occasional equally overheated meeting. The lady was married, middle class and though physically tempted, she was cautious. There's no evidence that the affair involved anything more than a certain amount of touch and go. She probably let him touch, but then she made him go.

Pregnant again.
Unlike Jean who in 1788  found herself again carrying twins.

By John Faed
The poet had been making the most of his Edinburgh celebrity even as he recognised that it might prove ephemeral. Her parents had learned of his financial success and begun to change their minds about him as a prospective son-in-law. Jean and Robert had made hay while the grudging sun of this approval shone. They could not, as the saying goes, keep their hands off each other, but this seems to have been as much at Jean's instigation as the poet's and to suggest otherwise is to deny agency to this strong woman. She was living in the parental home in the Cowgate in Mauchline. James Armour was a man of some consequence in the town who still didn't trust Burns. Jean could have insisted on a chaperone. Instead, she went out walking with the father of her weans, through the woods and fields, well away from the busy household and the prying eyes of the neighbours.

It says a great deal about their relationship and the manner of their courting that in later years, the song O Whistle and I'll Come To Ye, My Lad was a great favourite with Jean, who had her own version  - tho father and mither and a should gae mad, thy Jeanie will venture wi ye my lad. Sadly, this isn't generally the version sung, but it should be.


A girl out of pocket.
The pregnancy must have alarmed them, although it couldn't have come as a surprise. Burns went back to Edinburgh feeling guilty - and truculent - about the emotional and physical mess he had left behind. Unlike many men, he couldn't quite ignore it either. Soon, both of them would be in mourning for their thirteen month old daughter who seems to have died in a domestic accident.

I am a girl out of pocket and by careless murdering mischance too, he writes, bitterly.

He doesn't blame Jean, but I've often wondered if he blamed her mother, since the two were never close, even when Jean's father was reconciled to the marriage. When this second pregnancy began to show, Jean was sent to stay with Willie Muir and his wife at the mill near Tarbolton, a few miles from Mauchline.

Houses at Willie's Mill by Janet Muir

At Willie's Mill.
Willie Muir had been a friend to the poet's father, William, and would have been well acquainted with the Armour family too. In fact the story told in Mauchline isn't that the Armours had 'shown Jean the door' - a myth the poet himself liked to perpetuate - but that, anxious to shield their daughter and themselves from the Mauchline gossips, they waited until Jean was visiting the Muirs and then suggested that she stay put.

Certainly this second pregnancy, unlike the first, seems to have escaped the notice of the Kirk Session, since there is no reference to it in the minutes book for those months. Willie and his wife were fond of Jean and when the poet came back from Edinburgh, I reckon Willie told the younger man exactly what he thought of his behaviour. It didn't go down well, but it must have stung. Muir would know all the right buttons to push, where the troubled relationship between Burns and his late father was concerned.

Near the scene of the 'horse litter letter'.
The notorious letter.
And so we come to the subject of that notorious letter. Burns had arrived in Mauchline, all high handedness and self righteous sympathy. But stubborn as a mule too. No, he would not marry her. She had rejected him once and that was that. His protests ring a little too loudly for truth. The best we can say of his behaviour at this time is that it is out of character. He took a room for Jean in Mauchline and later, in a horribly laddish letter to a friend, he bragged that he had made love to a receptive Jean on some 'dry horse litter' in the nearby stable.

I suspect the truth was that Jean, utterly conflicted, submitted to him without much enjoyment and probably in some pain. This was contrary to all their past encounters. I think he knew it, was immediately guilty about it and felt the need to justify it. To recast it as something it was not. The babies, little girls, born soon after, were premature and did not survive for long.

Marriage.
Never a cruel man, Burns had betrayed not just Jean but his own self imposed code of kindness. Even the briefest analysis of his poems and songs shows just how often he uses that word as one of the greatest of all virtues. How often he uses it to describe Jean herself. Even while he was writing pompous rubbish to 'Clarinda' about how much he despised Jean, he was planning something quite different: a future into which she would fit as easily as breathing. He must have known that too.

Within an extraordinarily short space of time, he had trotted back to Mauchline seeking her forgiveness and the couple were officially married - traditionally at Gavin Hamilton's house, just along the road from Jean's lodgings. There is some evidence, in fact, that they were never not married, according to Scots law. But now the liaison was officially recognised.

Gavin Hamilton's house.

The Honeymoon.
The honeymoon period, as described in songs and letters, seems to have been both passionate and happy. This was the time of the exuberant I hae a wife of my ain and the simple but beautiful there's not a bonnie flower that springs by fountain, shaw or green, there's not a bonnie bird that sings, but minds me o my Jean.

Ellisland
Who among us would not melt at the final verse of Parnassus Hill, in which - travelling between Ellisland where their new farm was being built, and Mauchline where Jean was waiting for him - the poet envisaged Corsencon  Hill near Cumnock as Parnassus with Jean as his sweet muse?

By night, by day, afield, at hame, the thoughts of thee my breast inflame, and aye I muse and sing thy name - I only live to love thee. Though I were doomed to wander on, beyond the sea, beyond the sun, till my last weary sand was run - till then, and then I love thee.

Nobody knows.
Nobody ever knows what really goes on in a marriage and we sit in judgment at our peril. From the moment when they first set eyes on each other, Jean was never absent from Rab's story for very long. She lived for many years after his death and had offers of marriage, but turned them all down. She and James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, were good friends. She even took tea with Nancy McLehose. (Oh to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting!)

She kept flowers in the windows of the house in Dumfries and was endlessly patient with her many visitors. She looked after her grand-daughter for a short time and the girl never forgot her kindness. She visited Gilbert, Rab's brother, on the East Coast, but she was a poor correspondent and always neglected to tell them that she had arrived home safely, so he wrote her plaintive letters saying that for all they knew she could have fallen over Ettrick Stane on the journey.

I think I would have liked her immensely.

A kindly woman and a good humoured man.
I'm often asked what I think of Burns, having spent so long on research for my novel. I always say that I can feel the warm blast of his charm, his sexuality, but most of all his good humour, some 230 years later. There are very few 'sex pests' who would elicit that response. Very few too, who would elicit the kind of lifelong love shown by a fine woman like Jean Armour.

If you want to read more about Jean, the true story, you can seek out The Jewel. You should be able to find or order it in Waterstones and other good bookshops, as well as in the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway and - of course - online. There's also a companion book called For Jean, in which I've collected the poems, songs and letters for and about Jean, so that you can read them for yourself.

The truth is rarely simple, but we owe it to history to inform ourselves before making 21st century judgments. What do you think?

All about Jean.

.
Read the poems and letters for yourself.








At Brow Well on the Solway - the last days of Robert Burns's life.

At Brow Well on the Solway, you walk to the very edge of the land and almost tumble into a mass of thrift, clumps of pink flowers fringing the shore, like some wild garden. They face the sea, looking outwards and when the wind blows through them, they tremble with a dry, feathery sound.

At all times of the year, the wind blows unhindered across these mudflats. There is nothing to stop it, down here, on the Solway. And the sky is dazzling: high and bright with the malicious glitter of a sun half hidden behind clouds. It is a place of endings, of dizzying infinities. A place where long horizontals constantly carry the eye outwards and beyond. Where these same long horizontals dull the urge to fly.

In June, when the thrift is still in bloom, it is as restful as it will ever be. There are wild roses in the hedgerows, white, pale and dark pink. There is a froth of bramble flowers with the promise of fruit to come. Oystercatchers and peewits patrol the mud. There are whaups, curlews, bubbling in the peaty wastes. And you can hear the laverock, the skylark, climbing higher and higher, to the very edges of sound and tumbling through the skies in an ecstasy of movement. Down there, in front of you, a burn meanders through the mud, fresh water meeting salt, while beyond that again is more mud and silver water, cloud shadows and the misty hills of another country. But it is still the loneliest sight you will ever see.

On the third day of July in the year 1796, Robert Burns left his home in Dumfries, left his wife Jean and his children, and travelled to Brow Well on the Solway. It was, essentially, a poor man’s spa. There was a chalybeate or mineral spring with a stone tank built to house it and not much else. One Doctor Maxwell had diagnosed a wholly fictional malady called Flying Gout, and advised the poet to drink the waters in an effort to alleviate his symptoms. He was thin, he was weak, he could barely eat and he was in constant pain. It is likely that a systemic infection from a tooth abscess had caused his chronic endocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) to become acute. It would quickly prove fatal.

He was very ill.
He stayed in a cottage close by the well. He ate a little thin porridge, and drank some porter with milk in it. When the porter bottle was empty, he told his landlady that the ‘muckle black deil’ had got into his wallet, and asked her if she would accept his personal seal as payment but she refused it and brought him the porter anyway.

In July, the thrift would have been dying. As well as instructing him to drink the foul tasting waters, the doctors had recommended that Robert should try sea-bathing. They were only following the fashion of the time. In the south of England there would have been snug bathing machines and separate beaches for men and women to indulge in the novelty of salt water against skin. One month’s bathing in January was believed to be more efficacious than six months in summer. But perhaps there was a sense of urgency in the poet’s case. No time to wait for winter.

He was, no doubt, in that state of desperation where you will try anything. He would have gone struggling and staggering and wading into the sea, half a mile every day, far enough for the water to reach up to his waist, because that’s what the doctors had advised. Did they know how shallow these waters were? How far he would have to walk? How bitter the struggle for desperate mind over failing flesh? His landlady would have gone flounder trampling when she was a lassie, kilting her skirts up and wading out into the firth, feeling for the fishes with her toes. Did he feel the Solway flounders slithering away beneath his unsteady feet? It was his last chance of a cure and he was full of fear. Fear for his beloved Jean who was heavily pregnant. Fear of debt. Fear of death.

Nearby is the village of Ruthwell. In the church there is an Anglo Saxon cross. It is so tall that the floor has been dug out to make room for it. Because it was judged an idolatrous monument with its intricate carving, its runic inscriptions, which must have seemed suspiciously pagan, it was smashed into pieces on the orders of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. That was in 1664, but it lay where it fell for many years and the good folk of Ruthwell used the stone blocks as benches to sit upon, while they yawned their way through interminable sermons. 

The poet was invited to visit the manse at Ruthwell, but when the ladies there offered to pull a curtain across to shade his eyes from the sunlight, he asked them to leave it be. 'He will not shine long for me,' he said. 

The seawater would have done some good only in that it numbed the pain. It would have been his last chance. He had been a week at the salt water and wrote that he had secret fears that the business would be dangerous if not fatal. No flesh or fish could he swallow. Porridge and milk and porter were the only things he could taste. And how could he attempt horse-riding, which the doctors had also ordered, when he could not so much as drag himself up into the saddle?

‘God help my wife and children if I am taken from their head with Jean eight months gone’ he wrote. He sent letters to his father-in-law, James Armour, in Ayrshire, begging him to ask Jean’s mother come to Dumfries, but Mary Armour was visiting relatives in Fife and there was only silence from Mauchline. His correspondence reeks of desperation.

From the middle of the month, the tides were unsuitable for bathing, so he went home, borrowing a gig from a farmer named John Clark, in Locharwoods. When he got back to Dumfries, he was too weak to walk up the Mill Vennel, let alone climb the stairs to his bed. His young neighbour, Jessie Lewars, had to come out and 'oxter' him into the house.

Poor Burns had almost run his course. Still, he must struggle with the stream, 'till some chopping squall overset the silly vessel at last'. Love swells like the Solway but ebbs like the tide. Life too. 
He who always sang of rivers and streams, was coming, at last, to the sea. He died in Dumfries on 21st July 1796. Jean gave birth to his last child on the day of his funeral. 


If you want to read more about Robert Burns, but especially about his beloved Jean, look for my novel, The Jewel, all about the life of Jean Armour.





10 Questions About The Jewel for Book Groups

Last week, somebody contacted me to ask if I had any questions about the Jewel, to prompt book group discussions. I was very glad she had done so, because it's something I had originally thought about and then forgotten. I know some writers include them in the book itself, but in this instance, it seemed better to keep them separate.  Besides, I wanted time to think about them!

One good reason for delaying is that now, lots of people have asked me all kinds of questions about the novel, so I have a pretty good idea of the kind of things readers might want to discuss.


Anyway - here they are. There are no hard and fast answers and I'm sure people will have plenty of ideas of their own, but these are the issues that seem to have most interested audiences whenever I've been asked to speak about the Jewel.

1      1 Why do you think Jean has been so neglected as a significant figure in the poet’s life for so long? 

2 Why do you think Catherine wrote this in the third person – he said, she said – and not a first person account? Even though this is a third person account, we are pretty much always with Jean throughout the story. What problems might a first person account have presented?

3 What do you think first attracted the couple to each other, and why?

4 Why do you think Jean’s parents so disliked the idea of Burns as a prospective son-in-law? What made them change their minds?

5 How did you feel about the couple by the end of the novel. Did it change your perception of Burns as well as Jean? Did you feel better or worse about him? If you are female, do you think you would have fallen for him and why? Or why not?

6 What does the novel tell us about the kirk and family and attitudes towards morality at the time. Did any of this surprise you and if so, why? Why do you think having a child outside marriage seems to have become so much more of a disaster after the Industrial Revolution?

7 Burns seemed able to distinguish between an attachment of ‘romance’ and the reality of his love for Jean. The word romance itself has changed over the years. What do you think he meant by making this distinction, since he is at pains to stress his ‘love’ for his wife in letters and poems.

8 How far has the author succeeded in taking the reader back to the Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire of the eighteenth century?

9 The author says that everything in the novel either happened, or ‘could have happened’ but that most of the story is true. If you checked up on anything afterwards, were you surprised?

10 Do you think Jean was the love of the poet’s life? What do you think would have happened if he had lived longer?











Happy Birthday, Robert Burns!

There was a lad was born in Kyle, 
But whatna day o' whatna style, 
I doubt it's hardly worth the while 
To be sae nice wi Robin. 

Robin was a rovin' boy, 
Rantin', rovin', rantin', rovin', 
Robin was a rovin' boy, 
Rantin', rovin', Robin! 

Our monarch's hindmost year but ane
Was five-and-twenty days begun, 
'Twas then a blast o' Janwar' win' 
Blew hansel in on Robin. 
Robin was, &c. 

The gossip keekit in his loof, 
Quo' scho, "Wha lives will see the proof, 
This waly boy will be nae coof: 
I think we'll ca' him Robin." 
Robin was, &c. 

"He'll hae misfortunes great an' sma', 
But aye a heart aboon them a', 
He'll be a credit till us a'- 
We'll a' be proud o' Robin." 
Robin was, &c. 

If you want to read a bit more of Burns's poetry,  you could do worse than get a copy of For Jean - poems and songs written for and about Jean Armour, the poet's wife - and also entertaining extracts from letters that the poet wrote about their relationship, especially when it was at its most dramatic. If you want to know the whole story, you'll find it in my novel, The Jewel. (Both volumes published by Saraband.) People keep asking me which bits of my novel are true, and it's always a pleasure to be able to tell them that most of it really happened, even the part about the poet's race with the highlander. It was on the shores of Loch Lomond and both wild men finished up in a hedge, bruised and battered, but none the worse for the experience.  

Last night, I gave the Immortal Memory speech and toast, not of Robin, but of Jean herself. It was at a Jean Armour Event at the gorgeous Lochgreen House Hotel near Troon and it was organised by the Rotary Club of Troon. It was an exclusively female affair, apart from the waiters. No wild men at all,  and (if I dare say it) all the better for it: a wonderful, warm, generous talented bunch of women of all ages including young Becca Harris whose own 'wood note wild' was as beautiful as Jean's, and whose address to the haggis was the best I have ever heard. 

But really, it was all good. I can't remember when I last enjoyed anything so much. I think Jean would have loved it too! 

Researching and Writing Historical Fiction - Ten Tips to Get You Started

The Cottar's Saturday Night
Last week, I was asked to give a talk to the excellent Ayr Writers' Club about researching and writing historical fiction. It strikes me that quite a lot of other people might be interested in this too, whether they want to write novels, short stories or even plays with historical settings and themes. So I've tried to boil it all down into ten points: something to get you started while the year is still reasonably new.

1 Do your research. 
This is the key but just how much you need to do varies with the genre in which you're writing. You can do so much of it online now, that the risk is always that the research will take over, because let’s face it, it’s fascinating, and you can get engrossed in it, following one idea after another down the world wide rabbit warren. It’s important to try to immerse yourself in your chosen time and place, although this doesn’t necessarily mean reading dry academic histories. Think about social and domestic history, how people lived and worked, how they dressed and ate. Read letters too if you can find them. Don't dismiss the novels of the period. When I was writing The Jewel, one of my most useful finds was an early novel by John Galt called The Annals of The Parish, an accurate and at times hilarious account of life in a rural Ayrshire parish at just the right time for my novel. This kind of research will also help you to avoid howlers and anachronisms which will throw your reader right out of the world of the story.

2 Know when to stop. (For a bit) 
Research is its own reward and if you're that way inclined (and I am) you can easily get sidetracked by its endless fascination. Sometimes you have to take a conscious decision to stop researching and start writing.The trick is to do enough research so that you can ‘be’ in the time and place of your novel or story as you are writing it but also to recognise that ...

3 You can't know everything. 
Whatever you don’t know will become obvious as you write. Once you have a first draft under your belt, you will be able to check things, find things out, answer your own questions later on. You don’t know exactly what you don’t know until you realise you don’t know it. And that's fine.

4 Use your imagination. 
The questions writers have to ask themselves are: who, what, when, where, how and why. And what happened next, of course. But the question ‘what did that feel like?’ is the preserve of writers of fiction, mostly. Even biographers tend to be wary of venturing on that one, but novelists can go where angels fear to tread. And historical novelists – especially when they’ve done a lot of research – really have to give themselves permission to tackle the ‘what did that feel like’ aspect of the story, because it’s the biggest thing that will stop the factual research taking over and slowing the novel down. You have to try to treat your research lightly. It's the seasoning, rather than the big indigestible hunk of fat in the soup -  and wondering about feelings is one way of making sure that the story is deliciously readable and recognisable.

5 Allow yourself to make things up. 
When the historical record isn’t clear, you can make good guesses from the evidence before you, and since you’re writing fiction, you’re allowed to make things up. Within the bounds of possibility. You have a lot more freedom than a historian. But you should remember that even when you are making things up about known characters, you must consider what might conceivably have happened. If something seems incredible, then it probably is. And if it seems incredible to the reader it will throw him or her right out of the world of the story.

6 Make timelines and check dates. 
Especially when you’re writing from fact, timelines are invaluable. Find out not just what was going on in the wider world, but in detail. Find out what time of the year something happened. What was the weather like? (There are websites that will tell you this and sites that will tell you what day of the week a certain date fell on.) Knowing when something happened in relation to something else will often tell you a whole lot about the why and the how. If you're writing about real people, consider their ages. Often the extreme youth of certain characters tells you a lot about their behaviour or their relationships. In The Physic Garden, Thomas and William are based on real characters about whom we don't know very much except that there was some connection between them. I started out by thinking that an older professor had taken a very young gardener under his wing, as a professional man will sometimes mentor a younger man. Then I found out that they were of very similar ages, and my whole perception changed. They were friends. And the betrayal of that friendship gave me my story.

7 Choose a point of view. 
Are you telling the story as a first person narrative (as in The Physic Garden) or third person (as in The Jewel) - and if in the third person, are you still in the mind and point of view of one character in particular (The Jewel, Jean) or are you omniscient, the all seeing eye, and do you know how hard this can be to handle? If you are going for omniscient third person – you, as the author, seeing everything - you are going to have to be very careful about when and where you switch points of view. If you do it too abruptly, it disorientates the reader. Whole articles have been written about this and there's plenty of advice online, but it needn't be as complicated as it seems. The story itself will often dictate the persona in which it is told. Consistency is the key. 

8 Choose the language and dialect. 
This is closely related to (7) above. In the Jewel, I decided quite early on that it had to be a third person 'he said/she said' tale, but we are pretty much always with Jean in that novel – so it can be her story, but without too many of the challenges of trying to tackle a first person narrative for a genuine Ayrshire lass. Jean's voice was an 18th century Mauchline voice. In my novel, she uses the words and - largely - the patterns of speech you would expect. But the narrative, the storytelling, helps to make Jean accessible to a 21st century reader. As a writer you want to communicate, and you are always juggling marketability, the wants and needs of your readership, with what you want and need to do to make the characters authentic.   

9 Forge on. 
Get that first draft down, come hell or high water. Do Nanowrimo if you want or invent your own. You may find that - eventually - you can stop to polish along the way, but with a first novel in particular, it's important to get to the end, so that you have something to work on. When you are working, day to day, don't stop at the end of a chapter. Stop at a point where you really want to go on.  That way you'll want to start the next day. Once you have a first draft, however clumsy and unsatisfactory, however bad you think it is, let it lie fallow for a while, do some more research if you have to, and then go back to it and begin the real work of editing, rewriting, polishing. It's always easier to do this on an 'entity' - a whole novel - than on a small part of an unwritten whole. Printing out often helps at that stage. I write onto a PC but I often revise on paper.

10 Use Pinterest. 
I sometimes forget about this when I'm doing talks, but it really is an invaluable resource for writers, just because it contains so many wonderful images of costume, fashions, people, places, things - and often with links back to amazingly informative blog and websites. You can also set up secret boards that only you can see - mood boards for your particular project - where you can gather all sorts of images, add to them, go back to them time and again for inspiration, and eventually make them public if you want. Or delete them if you don't. A great resource. 

The Jewel and Jean


And here they are, side by side, all ready for some Burns Night inspiration, especially those 'replies from the lassies' that some of us have to do from time to time.

Actually, this year, I'm doing a couple of talks at Jean Armour Suppers instead - which I'm very much looking forward to - and I've just volunteered to do the Immortal Memory at a small local Burns Supper as well, as long as I can do it from Jean's point of view. Well, it's about time she had her say!

For Jean, coming soon.

When I was researching and writing The Jewel, my new novel about Jean Armour, the wife of Robert Burns, I soon realised that there were a number of poems and songs that seem to have been either written for Jean, or at least with Jean in mind - and that nobody seemed to have collected them together in one place before.

Until now.

Once or twice the poet even changed the name in the poem when he was feeling particularly hard done by, but it's clear from the rhyme and context that the words were intended for Jean.

Later this month, (just in time for Burns Night) Saraband will be publishing my little paperback selection of the poems, songs and letters written for or about Jean as a sort of companion volume to the Jewel. There are 31 poems, some illustrations and a series of fascinating extracts from the poet's letters telling the dramatic tale of his on/off relationship with his future wife. There are also a handful of letters written directly to Jean - extraordinarily loving and domestic. It seems clear to me that there may have been more of these personal letters that did not survive. Most of Burns's correspondents treasured their letters from the Bard, since he had become such a celebrity. For Jean, these were intimate little notes from her husband and she either didn't keep them or just possibly disposed of them before her death.

Wilkie's Penny Wedding
This is a small volume - only 90 pages long - but there is a glossary for each of the poems, as well as my explanatory notes about them and about how they fit into this most fascinating of love stories.

If you were wondering about the red roses on this blog, for January, it's because I'm firmly of the opinion that Red Red Rose was written for Jean. It's not just that it's a song about passionate and enduring love. There's something about young Jean herself - a striking brunette with vivid colouring - that may have reminded the poet of this most beautiful of blooms. And the 'till a' the seas gang dry, my dear' affirmation of love in Red Red Rose echoes lines he wrote earlier, very specifically for Jean, during what he calls 'the honeymoon'.

This is one of my all time favourite lyrics: 'O Were I on Parnassus Hill.' (Listen to it here, in a beautiful version by Ceolbeg)

'Tho I were doomed to wander on
Beyond the sea, beyond the sun,
Till my last weary sand was run,
Till then - and then I love thee.'

What woman wouldn't like to have such lines written for her?