Elizabeth Keir
Elizabeth Rae Keir (1747-1834), a poet and novelist, inhabited the outskirts of Edinburgh’s literary and social elite, and traces of her existence are difficult to recover. The daughter of a dental surgeon, she seems to have spent most of her youth in Corstorphine, which at that was well outside of Edinburgh. In 1779, she married William Keir, a Scottish physician at St. Thomas Hospital in London. After her husband’s sudden death in June 1783, she returned to Scotland with three children and again took up residence in Corstorphine. Keir was connected by friendship and marriage with the Keiths of Ravelstone, through whom she met Alison Cockburn and Walter Scott, among other leading lights of Edinburgh’s intellectual elite.
Keir published two novels, Interesting Memoirs (1785) and The History of Miss Greville (1787), but put her name to neither of them. While Interesting Memoirs was published in London by Strahan and Cadell, and in Edinburgh by Balfour and Creech, the title page of The History of Miss Greville explains that the book “is printed and sold for the author,” suggesting that poor sales of her first novel may have required Keir to subsidize the publication of the second. This is not entirely surprising, as both novels are sentimental and didactic, filled with long religious and philosophical disquisitions.
By contrast, Keir’s two volumes—almost 900 manuscript pages—of poems now held at the National Library of Scotland are lively and full of character, revealing a thorough acquaintance with the literature of her time. In the dedicatory letter preceding the first volume, Keir declares her “dread of censure and aversion…to the appellation of learned Lady,” and asserts her right “to become Authoress, without danger of becoming ridiculous.” For Keir, becoming an “Authoress” evidently did not require print publication, but merely the circulation of her manuscript within her “circle of chosen friends.” Most of the poems in the first volume are addressed to female friends, including Jane Kerr, or “Delia,” and Ann and Margaret Keith, although there are also a few addressed to her parents and her sister Marianne. A series of poems at the beginning of the second volume records Delia’s unexpected death, and William Keir, Elizabeth’s future husband, soon emerges as the primary addressee of her poems. Following William’s death in 1783, Keir addressed the majority of her poems to her children, nieces and nephews, and members of the Keith family into which her sister Marianne had married.
The death of Keir’s youngest son David Orme in 1810 seems to have put an end to her interest in writing. Her manuscript volumes contain only three poems following “Written while watching by the Corpse of my Son David Orme Keir. Edinburgh 19 May 1810,” and these were written at sporadic intervals in 1812, 1820, and 1825. Quite simply, as she lost her readership, Keir lost the impulse to write.