Helen Craik

Helen Craik (c. 1751 – 11 June 1825) was a Scottish poet and novelist, and a correspondent of Robert Burns. She praised Burns for being a "native genius, gay, unique and strong" in an introductory poem to his Glenriddell Manuscripts.

Helen Craik was born at Arbigland, Kirkbean near Dumfries, probably in 1751, as one of the six legitimate children of William Craik (1703–1798), a laird keen to improve a large estate of relatively poor land, and his wife Elizabeth (d. 1787), the daughter of William Stewart of New Abbey, also near Dumfries.

The naval captain John Paul Jones (1747–1792), who played a prominent part in founding the US navy, was also born at Arbigland. He was rumoured to be Helen Craik's father's illegitimate son. Suppositions that one of her sisters was the novelist Catherine Cuthbertson have not been substantiated. Craik was later to write an account of her father's life and agricultural innovations in the form of two letters to The Farmer's Magazine, published in 1811.

Craik became a correspondent of Robert Burns. Two of Burns's letters to her have survived. The first, dated 9 August 1790, and written from Ellisland, accompanied manuscript copies of two of Burns's "late Pieces". He also wrote to her expressing admiration for a poem of hers, "Helen", which has since been lost, as has much of her other poetry.

A later generation saw "Werterism" in her poetry, in the sense that its sentimentalism was influenced by Goethe's epistolary novel The Sorrows of Werther (1774, rev. 1787). Craik was also a friend of the fellow poet Maria Riddell, who was a niece by marriage to Burns's patron Robert Riddell, to whom Craik addressed two poems that survive in manuscript.

However, a breach may have appeared in the Craik family over the purported suicide of a groom on her father's estate. He was locally considered to have been engaged to marry Helen Craik and murdered for that reason by a member of her family. Whether this was true or not, Craik moved abruptly in 1792 from Arbigland to Flimby Hall, Cumberland, which belonged to relatives of hers, and stayed there for the rest of her life.

...
Wikipedia