Lady anne barnard childhood cancer

Lady Anne Barnard (née Lindsay) was born at Balcarres House in Fife, the eldest daughter of James Lindsay, Earl of Balcarres. As a beautiful, cultured woman she had many suitors but some were rejected by her parents as being insufficiently wealthy to deserve her and others did not appeal to her.

For this reason she was rather unfairly labelled as being fickle. Her younger sister Margaret’s first love, James Burges, was also blackballed by her parents because they did not think him good enough for her.

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This doomed love affair became the subject of Anne’s most famous poem, Auld Robin Gray, written in 1772 and published anonymously in 1823. At the age of seventeen her sister married Alexander Fordyce, a wealthy banker, and they moved to London where Anne joined them.

When his bank collapsed in 1772 Anne moved back to Scotland.

In 1776 she returned to London and moved in elevated social circles but often in company with some of the capital’s less respecta