POEMS BY A LADY, by Helen Craik, edited from the Beinecke Manuscript
Document Type
Book
Abstract
For a hundred years, the poetry of Helen Craik (1751–1825), from Arbigland in southwest Scotland, was thought to be lost. In fall 2020, her most important manuscript notebook, Poems of a Lady (1790), was rediscovered at Yale. Here transcribed and annotated for the first time, the Beinecke manuscript invites a fresh evaluation of Craik's life and work. From short satires and verse-letters to longer dramatic monologues of psychological introspection, the 39 poems in the manuscript offer insight into Craik's social circle in the Dumfries area, her wide literary interests, and her interaction with Robert Burns. They demonstrate the distinctive imagination seen later in Craik’s five Gothic novels, which have been the focus of most recent Craik criticism. The manuscript of Poems by a Lady was prepared at the request of Burns’s friend Robert Riddell, and specially bound for him; and it represents Craik’s own collection of her poetry. The introduction provides a detailed overview of Craik’s biography and the major themes in her work, casting new light on older myths about why, two years after the last poem here, she suddenly left Scotland. The text is accompanied by full notes on each poems’ background and sources; appendix 1 gives Craik's prose accounts of Arbigland, her father, and her family; appendix 2 reprinted two articles from 1919-1924, the only previous discussion of Craik's notebooks, with a few poems printed or excerpted from a notebook that remains unlocated. The volume concludes with a bibliography of works by and about Craik, and of background sources on her life and work. Paginated pp. i-xcii + 1- 233, i.e. 326 pp. total. .
Publication Info
Volume 52, 2023, pages i-233.