Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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...
EF
took the side of Queen Caroline in the persecutions of her trial.
Fletcher, Eliza. Autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher, of Edinburgh. Editor Richardson, Mary, Lady, Printed at the offices of C. Thurman for private circulation, 1874.
128
She was actually detected shedding tears as the procession passed by during the visit of George IV
to Edinburgh in summer...
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
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...
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, 1870, 2 vols.
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
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, 1973.
In this volume Recreation, an account of a female tea-party (beginning We took our work, and went, you see)
qtd. in
Armitage, Doris Mary. The Taylors of Ongar. W. Heffer and Sons, 1939.
142
catches a breathless dialogue of back-biting and slander. It shares its bustling tone...
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
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...
