Janet Schaw

JS , whose fluent and polished style suggests that she was well accustomed to writing, was a late-eighteenth-century Scotswoman who left a single text: a letter-form journal of travels. With some relations she sailed from Scotland to the Caribbean (where they acquired some months' experience of the slave-based economy of Antigua), then to North Carolina in what was soon to become the United States of America, then home again via an extended visit to Lisbon in Portugal. Schaw is a sharp-eyed observer, intelligent, opinionated, and conservative or reactionary.