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
Literary responses Jane Austen
JA 's early admirers among her fellow women writers constituted a small, select band. They included Sarah Harriet Burney , Anne Grant , Mary Ann Kelty , Maria Callcott , Maria Jane Jewsbury , Harriet Martineau
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
Friends, Associates Anne Bannerman
That summer she was a guest for some time in the house of Anne Grant .
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Letitia Barbauld
J. W. Croker 's notice in the Quarterly Review (in June 1812, wrongly attributed by some to Southey ) was most offensive of all. He reached for the gendered weapons so often drawn against Mary Wollstonecraft
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...
Friends, Associates Mary Brunton
MB 's earliest close friend in Edinburgh was a Mrs Izett. When she dedicated her first book to Joanna Baillie , this began a friendship between them. She was friendly with Anne Grant (who was...
Health Mary Brunton
Anne Grant related the story of the three-day labour and great suffering. After the baby was born dead, MB insisted on seeing it, held its hand, and said: The feeling this hand has caused to...
death Robert Burns
Anne Grant wrote prose remarks on his memory, a poem on his death, and Verses Addressed to Mrs Dunlop of Dunlop, on reading Burns's letters to that Lady.
Grant, Anne. Poems on Various Subjects. Printed for the Author by J. Moir.
261-6
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
Friends, Associates Catherine Fanshawe
CF 's friends included other highly literate middle-class women such as Mary Berry and Anne Grant in Edinburgh. (Her friendship with Grant was maintained entirely by correspondence—she and her sisters hoped to visit Edinburgh in...
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...
Literary responses Catherine Fanshawe
CF 's immediately posthumous reputation rested, like her writings themselves, on oral tradition. She had the admiration of William Cowper and Walter Scott , as well as Joanna Baillie , Anne Grant , and Mary Berry
Friends, Associates Eliza Fletcher
Hamilton, herself a conservative, set about de-demonizing EF 's political reputation. She had good success in persuading her friends that Mrs Fletcher was not the ferocious Democrat she had been represented, and that she neither...
politics Eliza Fletcher
EF took the side of Queen Caroline in the persecutions of her trial.
Fletcher, Eliza. Autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher, of Edinburgh. Editor Mary, Lady Richardson, Printed at the offices of C. Thurman for private circulation.
128
She was actually detected shedding tears as the procession passed by during the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in summer...
Literary responses Eliza Fletcher
She received letters of praise and congratulation on this publication from a number of distinguished pens. Anne Grant wrote characteristically that they far exceeded my expectations. She had expected exalted moral feeling, purity of sentiment...

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.