PAGAN, Isobel, born near Nith-head, 1741, died 1821. Poet.

In Isobel Pagan's Collection of Poems and Songs, published c. 1805, she states that she was born ‘near four miles from Nith-head’ in the south west of Scotland and educated for ‘ten weeks, when I was seven years old,/With a good old religious wife’. She also indicates that she was convivial by nature: ‘I sing a song with mirth and glee,/And sometimes I the whisky pree’ and that she ran a howff at Muirkirk, where she raised her illegitimate child.

High spirits and thoughtful qualities are equally present in her work. She composed in Scots, and was known as ‘Wicked Tibbie’ for her satirical skills (her work was transcribed by a tailor, William Gemmell). Her lyric version of ‘Ca’ the yowes to the knowes’, collected in The Scots Musical Museum (Johnson 1787—1803) by Robert Burns, has a subversive quality. Her heroine is not taken in by lovers’ tricks and, in the tradition of Allan Ramsay's cautious lover Jenny in The Gentle Shepherd (1725), wants hard currency before she offers herself: ‘gowns and ribbons meet’. On a more dignified note, pieces like ‘The Crook and the Plaid’ elevated those considered to be socially lowly into spiritually high positions. A shepherd lad is compared with the Biblical shepherd David: ‘when he came to be a king, and left his former trade,/’Twas an honour to the laddie that wears the crook and plaid’ (ll. 23—4). While Isobel Pagan's work has, hitherto, largely been considered as an appendix to Burns's, its imaginative range deserves more detailed critical consideration. VB

• Pagan, I. (1803) A Collection of Poems and Songs on Several Occasions; Johnson, J. (1787—1803) The Scots Musical Museum, vol. III, Song 264 (6 vols, reissued as 2 vols, 1962); Bold, V. (1997) ‘Beyond “The Empire of the Gentle Heart”: Scottish women poets of the nineteenth century’, in HSWW, (2007) James Hogg: a bard of nature's making, ODNB (2004); Paterson, J. (1840) The Contemporaries of Burns, and the More Recent Poets of Ayrshire, pp. 113—23, (1847) The Ballads and Songs of Ayrshire, pp. 63—6.