A Toast to the Lassie
A portrait of Robert Burns’s much-adored, long-suffering wife and muse July–August 2017
Almost every collection of Robert Burns’s poems includes an abbreviated (often inaccurate) account of the poet’s life. Standard biographies usually begin with the uneducated “Heaven-taught ploughman” of Ayrshire who was transformed, by the attentions of the great and the good, into “Scotland’s bard”; in fact, young Burns was well, albeit privately, educated and Scotland, unlike…