Stella Cartwright: George Mackay Brown’s Muse of Rose Street

10 April 2025, The Tablet

Stella Cartwright: ‘What emanated from her was a kind of radiance, a rich essence on which poets and artists feed to sustain themselves.’

Tablet features – an unconventional love story – the muse of Rose

Almost thirty years ago this spring, in the Special Collections room on the first floor of Edinburgh University Library, at a desk overlooking the Pentland Hills, something happened to change my life. A few weeks ­earlier, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown had died.

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