Author: BURRELL [née Raymond], (Sophia, Lady Burrell):
Title: Poems dedicated to the Right Honourable the Earl of Mansfield.
Description: London: Printed by T. Cooper, Bow Street, Covent Garden. Sold by Leigh and Sotheby, York Street, Covent Gardedn; T. P:ayne, at the Mews Gate; and J. Borson, in Bond Street. 1793. FIRST EDITION. 2 volumes. 8vo, 207 x 122 mms., pp. [viii] vi, 286; [ii], vii [viii Errata], 303 [304], including half-titles, title-page in volume 1 in cancelled state, author identified only on title-page of volume 2, contemporary mottled calf, gilt spines (rubbed and slightly dried); ink spot on title-page of volume, slight cracking of joints (but firm), corners slightly worn, but a reasonable set, inscribed on recto of front free end-paper of volume 1 "M. Augusta Martin" and "Richard and Julia Rowley." The former is possibly M. Augusta Martin (1844 - 1889, later Mrs. H. B. Schreiner; while the second names could be those of Richard Freeman Roweley (1806 - 1854) and Elizabeth Julia Angerstein (1804 - 1870). The dedicatee is William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield (1705 - 1793). The poet and playwright Soohia, Lady Burrell [née Raymond], (1753–1802) began writing poetry at an early age, mostly light verse, but also a setting of one of the Ossianic poems, Comala, published in 1784. Roger Lonsdale, in his anthology Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989)suggests that she wrote mostly for her own amusement and that of her family, but that the publication of these two volumes "illustrate the taste in the period for ballads, versifications of Ossian, and poems deriving from Goethe's Werther, as well as for druids, ruins, sensibility, mice, red-breasts and other creatures as subject-matter, but she also wrote some springtly verse to friends." The word "sprightly" probably verse on the gallant Colonel who cut the "Lady's stays...to recover her from a fainting fit....and exposed her charms." John Wolcot in The Montlhly Review for 1793 wrote, "ady Burrell's poetical talents ... we will venture to say, do honour to her pen. Some of the lines, it must be confessed, are too prosaic to be called poetical: but, as they are possibly attempts at simplicity, (for Lady B. has, in a number of places, discovered powers of energy,) what critic can be so fastidious, and so destitute of taste, as not to forgive the failure? 'Ubi plura nitent, non ego paucis offendar maculis,' is a maxim with Horace, and must ever be with Monthly Reviewers. Lady Burrell has also attempted the ludicrous and the satirical, not without success; and, in several sketches from Nature, she has shewn herself a poetical Teniers."

Keywords: poetry women literature


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