Anne Grant

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.