Elizabeth Rose, 19th Baroness of Kilravock (8 March 1747 – 1 November 1815) was an eighteenth-century Scottish literary critic and author.
The spinet, too has its merit ... methinks music is well as an amusement, but not as a study.’[2] In 1779 she married Dr Hugh Rose of Broadley, who died two years later,[3] and they had two children.
[7] Reading was intended to influence her own moral improvement and to prepare her for the world into which she had suddenly been thrust due to the premature deaths of her father, her brothers and her husband.
"[5] Robert Burns described her as ‘a true chieftain's wife, a daughter of Clephane', with 'sterling sense, warm heart, strong passions, honest pride, all in an uncommon degree…’[3] She died on 1 November 1815.
As she had requested, she was buried in the old [St. Mary's][9] chapel of Geddes with her coffin resting on birch trees cut from the Kilravock estate.
Grant described Rose's ‘elegant critisms’ as ‘an excellent cork jacket’ to keep her afloat as she ventured into the swampy world of publication.
[14] Her own style of writing…was not natural, and she has scarcely written anything worthy of being preserved for its intrinsic qualities - Hew Rose[15]She became an author by providence rather than design.
She kept financial records of estate business, alongside her annual reading lists of literature, philosophy, history, and natural science.
[16] And on her personal copy of Mary Robinson’s A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, Rose made significant additions to the ‘List of British Female Literary Characters’.