Frances Dunlop Reads Falconer's Shipwreck : Shared Books and Female Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Famous only for her correspondence with the poet Robert Burns, Frances Anna Dunlop (1730–1815) of Ayr and East Lothian has been the subject of little research. Scholars have traditionally viewed her letters as mere documentary fodder for Burns's life and writings. This essay counteracts the outsized focus on Burns by analysing Dunlop's many comments in her letters on books and authors beyond Burns. Dunlop's overlooked remarks on William Falconer's poem The Shipwreck (1762) opens a window onto Dunlop's literary life, critical values, and reading practices. These in turn reflect wider practices of gifting and sharing books among gentry women in rural Scotland. Much of Dunlop's advice to Burns in her letters seems moralizing and wrongheaded today, but when put in the context of her sharing of and socializing with books, and also of gendered contraints on expression, Dunlop's literary comments are wiser than they first appear.