Description
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Typescript of Edith Anne Robertson's 'Mair like a dream', a series of 4 radio broadcasts, read by Flora MacDonald Garry (1900 - 2000), on the BBC Scottish Home Service (later, Radio Four) in Feb 1966. The work, which was based on the recollections of a domestic servant from Fetterangus, Aberdeenshire, whom Edith Robertson had known whilst living in Aberdeen, is written in the Doric (Buchan dialect), and describes the farming life and people whom she knew during the period c 1860 - c 1880.
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History
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Edith Anne Stewart was born in Glasgow in 1883, the daughter of a United Free Church minister. The family later moved to Germany and latterly Surrey, England. Edith married James Alexander Robertson in 1919. After their marriage the Robertsons moved to northeast Scotland, where James was to take up his position as Professor of New Testament Language, Literature and Theology at the United Free Church College in Aberdeen. It was in this area that Edith was to spend much of her ensuing life, and which also provided the inspiration for many of her later pieces in Scots.
Edith Robertson's work reflects, in the main, her commitment to the church and the Christian faith, as well as her interest in the language and culture of the North East. Amongst her earliest published works are the Carmen Jesu Nazereni (1930), which is a translation of the Gospels into verse, and a biographical life of Francis Xavier. Her poems in Scots were published later, and include two interesting collections of poems by Walter de La Mare and Gerard Manley Hopkins which Edith had translated into Scots (Poems Frae the Suddron (1955), Translations into the Scots Tongue, etc (1968)). Her extensive correspondence shows that she had a wide and varied circle of friends, which included many writers and poets, among them, Marion Angus, David Daiches, Flora Garry, Nan Shepherd, and Douglas Young. The literary correspondence also contains a letter from Samuel Beckett, whose work Edith Robertson seems to have particularly admired. Edith outlived her husband by almost 20 years.
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