Helen Stewart

Helen D'Arcy Stewart (née Cranstoun; 1765–1838) was Scottish poet and a noted Edinburgh society hostess of the late 18th and early 19th century, as wife to Dugald Stewart, an influential Scottish philosopher and mathematician best known for popularizing the Scottish Enlightenment. Biography Helen D'Arcy Stewart was born on 13 March 1765, and was the third daughter of the Hon. George Cranstoun, and sister of George Cranstoun, Lord Corehouse, and of Jane Ann, later Countess Purgstall, both intimate friends of Sir Walter Scott. Her mother was Maria, daughter of Thomas Brisbane, of Brisbane in Ayrshire. As a girl she seems to have attracted notice by the charm of her manner and the brilliancy of her mind. She was devoted to poetry, and wrote verses which were praised by people of literary distinction who were strangers to her. It was said of her poems that they "must remind every friend who knew her of her graceful taste and sensibility, of her quick perception of humour, of her playful wit." It was out of her poetry that her marriage to Dugald Stewart is said to have been due. One of her poems was shown by her cousin, Lord Lothian, to Mr. Stewart, who was at that time his private tutor. The philosopher was sufficiently engaged by the poem to make an acquaintance with Helen, leading to their marriage on 26 July 1790, the age of the bride being twenty-five, and that of the bridegroom thirty-seven. The marriage was a perfectly happy one on both sides. The young wife doted on her reserved philosopher husband. He, who had the highest opinion of his wife's judgement, submitted all his writings to her. She was his habitual and confidential companion during his studies, and he never considered a piece of his composition to be finished until she had reviewed it. He himself said that, although she did not probably understand the abstract points of his philosophy so well as he did himself, yet when he had once made out a truth into an intelligible shape, she helped him to illustrate it "by a play of fancy and of feeling which could only come from a woman's mind."