Susanna Blamire
| Susanna Blamire | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 1747 |
| Died | 1794 (aged 46–47) |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | poet |
Susanna Blamire (1747–1794) was an English poet, known as The Muse of Cumberland. Her poems, collected in 1842, depicted Cumbrian life and manners. Her song And Ye shall walk in silk attire is particularly remembered.
Blamire was born at Cardew Hall, near Cardew, Cumberland, on 12 January 1747. Her parents were William Blamire, a farmer who died in 1758, and Isabella Simpson of who died in 1753. Left an orphan, she went to live with her mother's sister Mary who farmed at Thackwood, Stockdalewath. Through her brothers William, married to a sister of John Christian Curwen and father of William Blamire, and Richard, a bookseller in London, Susanna Blamire was connected to the wider worlds of politics and the arts. Her sister married Colonel Graham of Gartmore, an officer in the Highland regiment, giving a social connection to Scotland. Susannah went as her sister's companion on trips to The Scottish Highlands, London and Ireland
In Carlisle she encountered Catharine Gilpin of Scaleby Castle, who became a friend and possibly, according to Mandell Creighton, a co-author in verse.
Through another aunt, Mrs Fell a curates wife from Chilingham, she befriended the aristocratic Tankerville family . A family tradition maintains that there was talk of a possible marriage between her and the family's eldest son, Lord Ossulton, but the rigid social mores of the times prevented it and he was sent abroad. She remained unmarried.
Blamire suffered from a recurrent and severe form of rheumatic heart disease, which killed her at the age of 47.
She died in 1794 in Carlisle and is buried by her own request at Raughton Head chapel.
Blamire published little in her lifetime. Anonymously, in the Scots Musical Museum, she contributed songs in Lallans: What ails this Heart o' Mine?, and The Siller Croun (alias And ye shall walk in Silk Attire). With The Waefu' Heart, these three of her works were set to music by Joseph Haydn. She used Gothic allegories in Standard English and songs in Lowland Scots to express passionate emotions, What ails this Heart o' Mine being an example. Like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in their Lyrical Ballads of 1798, she wrote vignettes about local people and scenes, though in Cumberland dialect.
...
Wikipedia