Auld Robin and the Lady Available to Purchase

TO HAVE HER NAME PERPETUATED in the cocktail bar of a plush modern South African hotel may seem an odd fate for an eighteenth‐century Scottish poetess. You may not even be able to guess her identity. For there are certainly not many women's names to be found in the pages of Scottish literature before the twentieth century, and none in retrospect comparable in stature with George Eliot, Elizabeth Browning, Jane Austen or the Brontes south of the border.