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Legacy

Family Legacy

Opinions of Susanna Blamire as an author and person began during her lifetime, and included those opinions of her family, friends, and surrounding persons. An existing novel speculates about her personality and life, giving accounts from her family and close relatives on her personality. From this comes details of Susanna's brother, William, who "joked that the most vivacious youths of his day were dull and phlegmatic compared to his vibrant sister". Inside a preface to one of her early works, Susanna was highly considered by her surrounding family when she was alive, although after her death little of her remaining family members remembered anything substantial about her besides the opinion that she was a "fine, lovely lady".

Scholar and Author Legacy

Christopher Maycock, a scholar whom wrote on Susanna Blamire often, compares her to both Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth. More notable authors who commented on Susanna Blamire include Jonathan Wordsworth, who expressed views on her ideas of friendship. Jonathan wrote of her works, "loving relationship colours Susanna's thinking, shapes her poetry, on every level". Two admirers of her work, Patrick Maxwell of Edinburgh and Dr Henry Lonsdale of Carlisle began collecting her manuscripts in 1836. Patrick Maxwell thought of Susanna as having "infantine simplicity" in her writing, however he seemed not to comprehend the context of her poetry Patrick Maxwell also edited the collection of Blamire's poems published in 1842, and there claimed she was "unquestionably the best female writer of her age". He also attributed to her The Siller Croun. Charles Dickens in his The Old Curiosity Shop (1841, end of chapter 66) quoted the first two lines of "The Siller Croun":

" 'Sir' said Dick [Swiveller], ... 'we'll make a scholar of the poor Marchioness yet! And she shall walk in silk attire, and siller have to spare, or may I never rise from this bed again!' ".

Hugh MacDiarmid praised her in a radio broadcast in 1947, as "this sweet Cumbrian singer". He insisted that her Scottish songs are "the high-water mark of her achievement … so good that they can be set beside the best that have ever been produced by Scotsmen writing in their own tongue". Jonathan Wordsworth in 1994, dubbed her "The Poet of Friendship", predicting on BBC Radio Cumbria in 1998 that "Susanna will eventually be seen as important as the other Romantic poets writing during the eighteenth century, and should be more widely read". In The New Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry he likened Blamire's social position to that of Jane Austen:

‘the well-to-do maiden aunt’s life of good works and humorous observation'.

One of Susanna's works, "Stonewath", has been read as one example of Susanna's literary texts distinguishing her apart from her surroundings, while developing her own highly individual way of writing by setting the villages' daily life against a romantically lush landscape. Judith W. Page argues that Susanna Blamire was neglected in scholarship studies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Page expresses the opinion that "Stonewath" is among one of the "most accomplished poems" from around Blamire's time period. Finally, Page professes that Blamire was focused on "critiquing attitudes and ideologies that thwart connection to wholeness". This leads into her themes, which comment on her stature in society, and womanhood. All these could have led to Blamire's works falling out of favor within the public realm of literature after her death.

Frank Armin Paul references the eighteenth-century British influence on American pastoral poetry; Susanna Blamire is one poet who had a presence centuries later in the Americas. Huggins, another scholar, interprets Susanna Blamire’s works as showing a sense of her Scottish and Cumberian nationalism, and thus she may not have been as well read and studied because of her expression of her heritage. This point is made in discussing Robert Burns, and mentions Blamire writing similarly to Burns. The argument of her nationalism is a case for her to not be published and read as widely as if she possibly wrote on English Nationalism.

Mrs. Blamire had not been researched or studied intently until in the 1990's, when the second-wave feminist movement began in the United States. In this same article, there is a push to redraw the landscape of Romantic poetry, and this push uses Susana Blamire's writings in order to advocate for the teaching of early women writers. Other educators have recently pushed for Blamire to be considered in teaching during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.