The Ballad World of Anna Gordon, Mrs. Brown of Falkland

This book is a biographical study of unprecedented scope and detail of the celebrated Anna Gordon, Mrs. Brown of Falkland, whose magnificent repertory of old Scottish ballads attracted the fascinated attention of intellectuals and song collectors during the later years of the eighteenth century.Her ballads--the earliest to be gathered from a named living person--were recognized by the great Francis James Child as a unique source in the Anglo/Scottish tradition, superior in quality to all other versions.Anna Gordon was a literary woman, with a strongly intellectual middle-class background, educated by her father, a professor in one of Scotland's four universities who, himself, made significant contributions to Scottish Enlightenment thinking about literacy and the nature of language.She lived at the intersection of several different worlds, reflecting balladry, oral tradition and women's culture, as well as Enlightenment debates about orality and literacy and the rapidly-expanding imper