Anne Grant

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Standard Name: Grant, Anne
Birth Name: Anne MacVicar
Married Name: Anne Grant
Nickname: Mrs Grant of Laggan
Pseudonym: the Author of Letters from the Mountains
AG 's life as woman of letters, which had its foundations in a bookish, colonial American childhood and isolated, late-eighteenth-century married years in the Scottish Highlands, was constructed during her residence in Edinburgh during the early nineteenth century. Her initial attitude to publication was ambivalent (no doubt because she hated being in financial need), but by the end of her life she came to see herself as a serious poet. Her letters are full of acute and up-to-the-minute literary judgements: particularly on women writers, among whom she has no sympathy for radicals. Her best-known work today is her biography of a colonial North American woman, a fascinating document in cultural history.
Black and white engraving of Anne Grant by H. Robinson after a painting by K. Macleay. She sits in an armchair wearing a large ribboned cap and frilled collar tied with a black bow, with a shawl over her dress. Behind her is a dark curtain and a small table with books and papers. Above her right shoulder a window shows a Highland scene: a little boat on a tree-fringed loch and hills or mountains behind.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Eunice Guthrie Murray
Her subjects here include such comparatively well-known authors as Joanna Baillie , Anne Grant , and Margaret Oliphant , and also the almost unknown diarist and novelist Margaret Calderwood .
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Katharine Elwood
Some of the British women writers discussed in the text remain well-known, but others have slipped into obscurity. Memoirs includes: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Griselda Murray , Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford , Hester Lynch Piozzi
Theme or Topic Treated in Text George Paston
GP shows here her interest in women writers, all of them letter-writers and commentators on the social scene. They are, apart from Anne Grant of Laggan, all noblewomen: Elizabeth Craven (later Lady Berkeley and later again Margravine of Anspach)
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS 's correspondence during the years 1827-39, when she was composing her Introductory Anecdotes on her grandmother, throws much light on attitudes to female authorship. Selections includes her acute, even satirical, comment on the Bluestockings...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Melesina Trench
About the first twenty pages are occupied by MT 's early reminiscences, probably written not long after her first husband's death: she frankly recorded her emotional disturbance over that event.
Trench, Melesina. The Remains of the Late Mrs. Richard Trench. Editor Trench, Richard Chenevix, Parker and Bourn.
18
Later pages mix letters...
Textual Production Mary Russell Mitford
Sir William Elford had suggested to MRM by 1824 that (always needing money) she might publish her letters to him. She replied that, if she published, her free comments on books and authors would make...
Textual Production Catherine Fanshawe
The letters that CF sent to Anne Grant are not extant, but Grant's side of the correspondence leaves no doubt that the two were in constant dialogue about new books they had read, and their...
Textual Production Joanna Baillie
Here she gathered together poems by such writers as Walter Scott , George Crabbe , William Wordsworth , Robert Southey , Felicia Hemans (whose work Baillie warmly admired), Anne Grant of Laggan, Anna Maria Porter
Textual Features Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
This edition was published by Colburn . EOB 's excellent scholarly introduction dwells on recent literary achievements of women. She does not explicitly identify the British ones she refers to, but they are clearly (as...
Textual Features Isabella Lickbarrow
Other kinds of poem in the volume include a ghost story and a fairy story, as well as dramatic monologues in the voices of a widow (who misses her husband's protecting hand) and of a...
Textual Features Mary Russell Mitford
MRM has no patience with Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The Countess and Gertrude or with Byron 's Childe Harold.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 133, 152
She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
Textual Features Carola Oman
She notes that the writer Anne Grant was the first person known to have applied the wizard title to Scott, though she is unable actually to credit her as its originator.
Oman, Carola. The Wizard of the North. Hodder and Stoughton.
10
She mentions Joanna Baillie
Textual Features Jane Taylor
In this volume Recreation, an account of a female tea-party (beginning We took our work, and went, you see)
Armitage, Doris Mary. The Taylors of Ongar. W. Heffer and Sons.
142
catches a breathless dialogue of back-biting and slander. It shares its bustling tone...
Textual Features Susanna Watts
The many pictures in the volume include diagrams of the hold of a slave ship, I & Dash my Dog (a sketch), and prints of Hester Mulso Chapone , Lady Rachel Russell (with a copy...
Textual Features Christian Isobel Johnstone
The story opens in the Highlands, with the birth of a baby son to an apparently vagrant mother, who dies in childbirth, despite the best efforts of the wise matriarch of the people, Unah...

Timeline

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Texts

Grant, Anne. Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown; J. Ballantyne, 1814.
Grant, Anne. Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1811.
Grant, Anne. Letters from the Mountains. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806.
Grant, Anne. Letters from the Mountains. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807.
Grant, Anne. Letters from the Mountains. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809.
Grant, Anne. “Letters Written by Mrs. Grant of Laggan Concerning Highland Affairs and Persons Connected With the Stuart Cause in the Eighteenth Century”. Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston, edited by James Robert Nicolson Macphail, Edinburgh University Press, 1896, pp. 248-30.
Grant, Anne. Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan. Editor Grant, John Peter, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844.
Grant, Anne. Memoirs of an American Lady. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808.
Grant, Anne. Memoirs of an American Lady. Editor Wilson, James Grant, Books for Libraries Press, 1972.
Grant, Anne. Poems on Various Subjects. Printed for the Author by J. Moir, 1803.
Wilson, James Grant, and Anne Grant. “Preface, Memoir of Mrs. Grant”. Memoirs of an American Lady, edited by James Grant Wilson and James Grant Wilson, Books for Libraries Press, 1972, p. ix - xxxvi.
Grant, Anne. The Highlanders and Other Poems. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808.