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Author: Milne, Christian

Biography:

Milne, Christian formerly Ross (1772-1841: ancestry.co.uk)

The preface to her book includes a narrative of her life; in slightly amplified form, this is also in Sketches of Obscure Poets (1833) and Letters from the North Highlands. Both give her birth year as 1773 but records in ancestry.co.uk show 1772. She was one of ten children born at Inverness to Thomas Ross, a carpenter and cabinet maker, and his wife, Mary (Gordon). The family moved to Auchintoul, Banffshire, where she briefly attended school; she records her particular delight in poetry but says she did not start composing until she was about fourteen when she was in service in Aberdeen. Her mother and most of her siblings died (dates unknown), and Christian and her father moved to Edinburgh after Thomas went bankrupt. She supported her father by working as a servant but she developed tuberculosis and decided to return to Aberdeen where, with the recovery of her health, she was employed as a servant. In the meantime, her father had died in Edinburgh although Christian learned of this only months later. She married Peter Milne, a shipmaker, in 1797 and they had at least four children. She is in the 1841 census as living in Virginia Street, Aberdeen, with her husband and three adult children.  She died in the same year. Influential friends in Aberdeen enabled her to publish her book by subscription (there is no list, however); it is dedicated to the Duchess of Gordon. (ancestry.co.uk 18 Mar. 2020; Sketches of Obscure Poets [1833]; Elizabeth Isabella Spence, Letters from the North Highlands [1817])

 

Books written (1):

Aberdeen: printed for the author by J. Chalmers and Co., 1805