Elizabeth Duncan Campbell

Elizabeth Duncan Campbell (11 February 1804 – 24 December 1878) was a Scottish working-class poet and autobiographical writer.

Early life, education, and early career Campbell was born on 11 February 1804 at Quarry Head, Edzell, Forfarshire, Scotland. She was baptized in Tannadice parish. and she was the fifth of six surviving daughters born to her family. Her mother died when Campbell was aged three, which she later wrote about in her poetry as her first clear memory, stating that she and her sisters "wandered like forlorn cows from morn to night."

Campbell briefly attended the village school, where she learned to read, before entering agricultural service, aged seven.

While working as a domestic servant for the Gray family, Campbell lived in Saint Malo, France, for two years.

In 1832, when she was aged twenty-nine, Campbell married a flax dresser from Brechin, Forfarshire, called William Campbell.

Campbell wrote in her poetry that her life had been "full of toil and sorrows so many and so deep that I never could tell them." Two of her sons died in infancy. Another son, called Willie, fought at Sebastopol in the Crimean War and survived, but was killed in a factory accident,

Campbell also included abolitionist views in her poems.

Death Campbell was burned when her clothing caught fire and she died on 24 December 1878 in Lochee, Dundee, Scotland.

Publications Burns’ Centenary, an Ode: and Other Poems (1862) Songs of My Pilgrimage (1875)

Her poems Willie Mill's Burn and Three Score and Ten were included in One Hundred Modern Scottish Poets (1880) by David Herschell Edwards.