Description

Visit Esther Easton, a Jedburgh gardener’s wife, flower arranger, exemplary autodidact and reciter of Homer. She would have been lost to history had she not been visited by the poet Robert Burns, on his travels through the Scottish borders, on 9^th May 1787.  Burns was at the time engaged in a tricky romance with Isabella Lindsay, daughter of a local doctor and landowner, and needed some diversion. He was taken to meet the prodigious wife of the gardener on the Lindsay Estate, Esther Easton, who astonished him. He recorded that she was ‘a very remarkable woman for reciting poetry of all kinds, and sometimes making Scotch doggerel herself—she can repeat by heart almost everything she has ever read, particularly Pope’s ‘Homer’ from end to end; has studied Euclid by herself; and, in short, is a woman of very extraordinary abilities’ and ‘a great florist.’ Learning all of Pope’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey off-by-heart was an extraordinary achievement; it would be good to know if Esther ever transposed any Homeric themes into ’Scotch doggerel’.

n.b. no picture of Esther Easton exists (as far as we can tell), the woman in the image someone in contemporary dress.