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
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Hamilton
While in Wales they visited Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby (the ladies of Llangollen) and in the Lakes they stayed with Elizabeth Smith and her family.
Benger, Elizabeth Ogilvy. Memoirs of the late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown.
1: 152-4
Smith, Elizabeth. Fragments, In Prose and Verse. Editor Bowdler, Henrietta Maria, Richard Cruttwell.
151
In Edinburgh in 1803...
Literary responses Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
Anne Grant was particularly enthusiastic. She said she could give a whole summer to this novel: they will tell you it is dry at first, and long throughout. The first volume you will find sterile...
Friends, Associates Felicia Hemans
While in Scotland she met not only Scott and Jeffrey , she met in person her publisher William Blackwood , writer Anne Grant , critic John Wilson , and sculptor Angus Fletcher .
Lawrence, Rose. The Last Autumn at a Favorite Residence, with Other Poems. G. and J. Robinson, etc. and John Murray.
347
Hughes, Harriet Browne Owen, and Felicia Hemans. “Memoir of Mrs. Hemans”. The Works of Mrs. Hemans, W. Blackwood, pp. 1-315.
201
Literary responses Samuel Johnson
Hostile response was immediate and clamorous. Johnson was accused of inveterate prejudice against Scotland and the Scots, an accusation which continued to be repeated even by some readers, like Anne Grant , who were admirers...
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...
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 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 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...
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 .
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
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)
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Isabella Spence
Spence's title-page bears a quotation from James Cririe , a little-known Scots poet whom Burns had praised (and whom she cites several times later in her text). Perhaps for the sake of her original audience...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Isabella Spence
Literary historian Pam Perkins points out that Spence here describes a feminocenric cultural milieu, and develops a confident voice in doing so., that she foregrounds her own roots in the Aberdeen Enlightenment, and that her...
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...
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...

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