THE SONG IN THE GREEN THORN TREE

This- with its predecessor, The Wind That Shakes The Barley (1947) provide an excellent semi-fictionalized biography of the poet, Robert Burns. This second volume defines the years when, with his mother and brother, he moved to an Ayrshire farm. Ploughman and poet now, this is the period of Burns' light o' love; of his passion for Jean Armour, and the marriage his family opposed; of his affair with Highland Mary. These romantic episodes form the scarlet thread of a closely woven narrative in which too are the strands of his love of liberty, his war against dour Puritanism, his struggle with debt and poverty, his ever-gay relations with friends and neighbors, whose esteem he won despite all else, and his mounting poetic fame. This ends on the note of his reconciliation with Jean, and his decision to try his literary fortunes in Edinburgh. Popular reading and a goldmine for honest romantics.