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After reading last weekend's fascinating article on the background story and production of the forthcoming film 1745 I thought of Rabbie Burns (Scotland, slavery and sisterhood, Sunday Herald Life, May 21).
I've always found it ironic that Burns, because of his desperate poverty or perhaps even a certain naivety, planned to take up a job in the West Indies where his doctor friend owned a sugar plantation. If it hadn't been for the delay in embarkation to Jamaica, the birth of his twins to Jean Armour and the unforeseen rush to buy his poems in the Kilmarnock edition, he might well have been employed in the "paperwork" of the slave trade. A far remove from "a (wo)man's a (wo)man for a that!"
Anne Connolly
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