Jean Gardner

Who is Jean Gardner?

Jean Gardner or later Jean Hill, was a "a young woman of very surpassing beauty", with a "light foot and an ensnaring eye", but she may have been thirteen years older than Robert Burns with whom she was on friendly or 'intimate' terms. A strong local tradition in Irvine links her with Robert Burns, however no contemporary written evidence records this relationship and Burns himself is not thought to have written about her, other than a disputed use of her given name as the 'darling Jean' of Burns's 'Epistle to Davie', and most recent writers have considered the reference to be to Jean Armour.