Janet Little

Janet Little (1759-1813) was baptized on 13 August 1759 near Ecclefechan, Dumfries, Scotland. After a limited education, she became a servant to a local clergyman. By 1788, after acquiring some reputation as a working-class female poet, she sought a post as chambermaid or nurse with Frances Dunlop in Ayrshire. Mrs. Dunlop was a friend, correspondent, and patroness of the poet Robert Burns. She later worked for Dunlop’s daughter at Loudoun Castle near Galston, primarily in the dairy, from whence she derived her title, “The Scotch Milkmaid.” It is at Loudoun where she wrote to Burns on 12 July 1789, enclosing a poem addressed to him and hoping for his “favour and friendship.” Burns eventually advised Dunlop about the publication of Little’s poems and assisted with the subscription. Little married John Richmond in 1792, a laborer at the Castle, a widower with five children and nearly twenty years her senior. She was a member of the Dissenting congregation in Galston led by the Rev. Mr. Blackwood. She died at Loudoun on 15 March 1813, after a short illness. See her Poetical Works (Air: John and Peter Wilson, 1792). For more on Little, see Leith Davis, “Gender and the Nation in the Work of Robert Burns and Janet Little,”Studies In English Literature 38.4 (1998), 621-645; Moira Ferguson, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Nation, Class, and Gender (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); Anne Milne, “Dogs And The 'Talking Animal Syndrome' in Janet Little's 'From Snipe, A Favourite Dog, To His Master' (1791),” Scottish Studies Review 4.1 (2003), 69-81.