The Poetry of Janet Stewart (1781-1835)

Résumé du livre

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Richard D. Jackson. A

Janet Stewart was born in an Edinburgh village known as 'Water of Leith'. She was an only child and the merchant who was her father died when she was fourteen years old. Her literary abilites were developed by Dr Robert Anderson the well known scholar and biographer. In 1801, and using the pseudonym of 'Adeline', her poetry began to be published in the Edinburgh Magazine, or Literay Miscellany of which he was the editor. More of her poetry was included in a Poetical Register and Repository of Fugitive Poetry, as well as in a number of other Specific Volumes.

Her most ambitious poem is a forty-nine stanza Ode which was occasioned by her reading of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry published by Dr Thomas Percy, Lord Bishop of Dromore. When her Ode was published in 1804, it was greatly admired by James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who sent her a very flirtatious letter. He said he had been 'greatly taken with the harmony of even your most trifling pieces' but now 'there is not a more beautiful poem in the English language' than her Ode. 'I do and ever will look upon you as a miracle in nature'.

In 1821 Oliver & Boyd of Edinburgh published Janet Stewart's novel St Aubin; or, The Infidel, written in the style of an early Gothic Romance. And in 1824 her thirteen Chapter 'juvenile story' called Miriam and Ellinor 'By the author of St Aubin' was also published in Edinburgh. It is really a short adult novel that includes references to the behaviour of the time in the Higher Social Class; to the disguised names of men such as Lord Byron, Lord Melbourne; and to Iaac Nathan's Hebrew Melodies.

Interestingly Elinor and Marianne was the name that Jane Austen gave to an early version of her novel Sense and Sensibility. When this novel was published by Thomas Egerton in 1811 it was said to be 'By a Lady', and Elinor and Marianne are the names of the two older sisters in the published novel.

Janet Stewart died unmarried at the age of 54 in the village of Water of Leith on 19 December 1835 and is buried in the Churchyard of St Cuthbert's Church, Edinburgh.