Frances Anna Wallace of Craigie

From The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, edited by Elizabeth L. Ewan, Sue Innes, Sian Reynolds, Rose Pipes

Dunlop, Frances Anna, n. Wallace, born Craigie House, Wallacetown, near Ayr, 16 April 1730, died Dunlop House, Dunlop, Ayrshire, 24 May 1815. Landowner and correspondent of Robert Burns, poet. Daughter of Lady Eleanor Agness, heiress to the Lochryan Estate, and Sir Thomas Wallace, advocate.

In 1748, Frances Wallace eloped from Dunskey House in Wigtownshire with John Dunlop of Dunlop (1707-85). The marriage was happy and they had seven sons and six daughters. She inherited the Lochryan Estate on her mother's death in 1761. When her husband died on 5 June 1785, she suffered a breakdown lasting more than a year. She was given a copy of Robert Burns' poem "The Cotter's Saturday Night", and its sentiments touched her heart. In November 1786, she ordered from Burns six copies of "Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect". This began a correspondence, and they met at least five times. Although Burns valued her opinion and shared his thoughts with her, Frances Dunlop and he were political opposites and this emerged in a letter dated 12 January 1795 in which Burns referred to the executed French monarchs as "a perjured Blockhead & an unprincipled Prostitute". As two of her daughters were married to French royalist emigres, she found this unacceptable language.

After Burns' death, Frances Dunlop and her daughter Eleanor Perochon showed great kindness to his widow Jean Armour (Burns, G., Narriative Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, 1797; ODNB (2004); Wallace, W. (1898) Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop) and her family. When Burns' remains were moved from his tomb to the Burns Mausoleum on 19 September 1817, Jean Armour agreed that when Eleanor Perochon died, she could be laid to rest in the vacated tomb of the poet. She died on 10 October, 182, and lies where Burns once lay. MB