Anna Gordon, also known as Mrs Brown or Mrs Brown of Falkland, was one of the most important British ballad collectors.
Life
Rather little is known of Anna's life. She was born in Old Aberdeen, youngest daughter to Lilias Forbes of Disblair and her husband Thomas Gordon, who was the professor of humanity at King's College, Aberdeen. Details of Anna's education are unclear. On 13 December 1788 she married the Revd Dr Andrew Brown, who, following work as a chaplain in the army, became minister of Falkland, Fife, and then Tranent. Thus Anna is widely known among scholars as Mrs Brown of Falkland. However, Anna is famed as a collector of Scottish ballads. Fifty of Anna's ballads were written down between about 1783 and 1801; some were published by Walter Scott and Robert Jamieson in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and Popular Ballads and Songs. 27 of the ‘A’ texts in English and Scottish Popular Ballads by Francis James Child were supplied by Anna. She is an important source, for example, of a text of Thomas the Rhymer. The sources of Anna's repertory are therefore viewed as an important question; she seems to have learned it as a child from her mother, her mother's sister Anne Forbes, and from an unnamed nursemaid. Music was prominent in her family background. However, access to music was in Scotland at the time highly gendered: membership of, for example, the Aberdeen Musical Society was closed to women. 'Anna Gordon's father expressed surprise at his daughter's skill in balladry and confessed that the words and tunes were previously unknown to him.' Whatever the precise relationship of Anna's ballads to earlier oral tradition, Anna's correspondence reveals 'a woman with a well-definedaesthetic sense, an established knowledge of literature and ballad scholarship, and some sense of the importance of her contributions to that scholarship'.
Literary significance
The literary significance of Anna Gordon's ballads is undisputed—but its precise character has been a matter of considerable debate: Whatever the case, Anna's ballads seem to represent an important insight into eighteenth-century women's literature:
