Anne Grant Research Articles

Landscape in Translation: Anne Grant and the Highlands

Landscape in Translation: Anne Grant and the Highlands

Women, Oral Culture, and Book History in the Romantic-Era British Archipelago: Charlotte Brooke, Anne Grant, and Felicia Hemans

Women, Oral Culture, and Book History in the Romantic-Era British Archipelago: Charlotte Brooke, Anne Grant, and Felicia Hemans

Social Authorship and the Mediation of Memory in Anne Grant’s Poetry

ABSTRACTIn the early 1820s, Anne MacVicar Grant (1755–1838) compiled a manuscript miscellany that exemplifies Grant’s poetic activities throughout her writing life and encapsulates the conditions under which she composed and circulated verse. I identify those conditions as a form of social authorship, and the miscellany as a media object that records activities of reading, writing, and manuscript circulation closely resembling those of literary coteries. Moreover, the miscellany functioned as a memorial to the social networks that the circulation of poetry had helped to create. Each poem formed a node not only in Grant’s social circles but in her memories of those circles so that the compilation and annotation of poems mediated Grant’s memories of her social circles to those with access to the volume. Grant’s iterative inscription and reading of the miscellany thus turned commemorative poetry into a technology for the medialization and memorialization of social networks.

‘She has her ladies too’: Women and Scottish Periodical Culture in Blackwood's Early Years

This essay looks at some of the women who were published in and reviewed by Blackwood's Magazine in its early years. While the important contributions of women to the Blackwood's of the Victorian period have always been recognised, the Romantic-era magazine is better remembered for a sometimes aggressively ‘masculine’ tone. Women appeared in Blackwood's from the beginning, however, even if only in small numbers. Focusing first on reviews of major women writers – including Madame de Staël and Mary Shelley – and then turning to Felicia Hemans and Anne Grant, both of whom had poems published in the first year of the magazine's run, the essay argues that comments on these women and their work can illuminate the ways in which Blackwood's positioned itself in the competitive world of the Scottish periodical press.

“News from Scotland”: Female Networks in the Travel Narratives of Elizabeth Isabella Spence

ABSTRACTThis article looks at some still relatively neglected travelogues by the Anglo-Scottish novelist and traveller Elizabeth Isabella Spence (1768–1832). Focusing principally on Spence's final book of travels, Letters from the North Highlands of Scotland (1817), the article places this work in the context of the contemporaneous fashion for writing about Scotland and argues that some of the most significant of Spence's influences were other women, including the poet and essayist Anne Grant and Jane Porter, author of the bestselling novel The Scottish Chiefs (1810). While Spence's work shares some of the typical preoccupations of other Scottish travelogues of the day—from antiquarianism to reflections on the sublime—it is markedly different from them in its evocation of and dependence on a social network of female intellectuals. This article argues that Letters from the North Highlands of Scotland creates an unusually feminocentric version of the Romantic-era Scottish tour: it is addressed to Porter; it draws on prior work by (among others) Grant and Elizabeth Hamilton; and it features detailed descriptions of encounters with the Aberdeen working-class poet Christian Milne and the novelist Christian Isobel Johnstone. Unfortunately for Spence, that aspect of her work also fuelled a devastatingly satiric Blackwood's review that turned her into a laughing stock.

Edinburgh companion to Scottish women's writing

This book explores the richness of women's contribution to Scottish literature. By combining historical spread with a thematic structure, this volume explores the ways in which gender has shaped literary output and addresses the changing situations in which women lived and wrote. It places the work of established writers such as Margaret Oliphant, Naomi Mitchison and A.L. Kennedy in new contexts and discusses the writing of critically neglected figures such as Sileas na Ceapaich, Mary Queen of Scots, Anne Grant, Janet Hamilton, Isabella Bird, F. Marion McNeill and Denise Mina. It includes innovative scholarship from leading critics of gender and Scottish Studies, such as Sarah Dunnigan (Edinburgh), Carol Anderson (Open University), Pam Perkins (Manitoba) and Florence Boos (Iowa). It responds to current developments in the field of feminist and literary studies. It includes a guide to further reading for each chapter.

Highland Emigration and the Transformation of Nostalgia in Romantic Poetry

This essay examines Scottish Highlanders as both objects of and participants in British Romanticism by bringing into conversation Gaelic song and English-language poetry about Highland emigration. Together, Gaelic song and English-language poetry reveal Highland emigration's role in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transformation of nostalgia from pathology to sentiment. By tracing representations of emigration through Gaelic songs by John MacCodrum, Calum Bàn MacMhannain and John MacDonald, and English-language poetry by Anne Grant and Felicia Hemans, the essay shows how nostalgia emerged from the specific context of the Highland Clearances to become a more generalized Romantic condition. The essay then turns to some of Wordsworth's poems inspired by his 1803 and 1831 visits to Scotland to argue that although the Clearances seem to have made little impact on “high” Romanticism, the nostalgia that they represented not only permeated English-language poetic representations of Highlands and Highlanders but may also have been absorbed by Gaelic-speaking poets. In a kind of literary-historical feedback loop, Gaelic poets' depictions of emigration were influenced by English-language representations of Gaelic emigration songs.

Further Letters of Joanna Baillie ed. by Thomas McLean

Book Reviews Further Letters ofJoanna Baillie. Edited by Thomas McLean. Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. Pp. 296. $67.50. In Thomas McLean’s introduction to his collection, Further Letters ofJoanna Baillie, he notes the “rather remarkable and frustrating fact” that none of Baillie’s letters written during the first thirty-seven years of her life have as yet been discovered—due to “(alas) her habit of burning old correspon­ dence” (23). But clearly this habit changed between the time when Baillie was identified as the author of A Series of Plays in 1800 and her death in 1851, because another 234 missives have now emerged from archives all over the world, adding to the trove of Baillie letters published by Judith Bailey Slagle in her two-volume collection in 1999. Moreover, since the publication of McLean’s edition of letters in 2010, another thirty unpub­ lished letters have surfaced, which suggests that many more libraries— public and private—may eventually divulge Baillie correspondence. With this in mind, McLean has created (with the help of Regina Hewitt, Laura Mandell, and Mike Quilligan) an online chronology of Baillie’s correspon­ dence, which is available free of charge on the Romantic Circles website. McLean’s book provides an important addition to the burgeoning schol­ arship on Baillie, and his introduction helpfully suggests the insights he be­ lieves this new edition of letters gives into her relationships with contem­ poraries such as Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Lady Byron, Sir John Herschel, and William Wordsworth (“He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say,” Baillie wrote in 1837 [181]). The collection also provides “examples of Baillie’s generosity to both friends and strangers in difficult circumstances” (26); her support of young writers; her “interest in the United States” (23); and her “uneven relationship with Sarah Siddons” (24). In addition, McLean writes, the Baillie letters in this collection “enhance our understanding ofBaillie’s rela­ tionship to Scotland” by extending “our knowledge of Baillie’s relation­ ships with contemporary Scottish writers, including Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Grant, and Hector MacNeill, as well as Thomas Campbell, scientist Mary Somerville, and Captain Alexander Dirom” (25). But the “most significant addition to our conception ofBaillie and the contemporary the­ ater world,” in McLean’s view, comes from Baillie’s letters to George and SiR, 51 (Fall 2012) 449 450 BOOK REVIEWS Sarah Bartley; while nine appeared in The Collected Letters, seventeen more have come to light. George Bartley was “best known for his Falstaff,” and Sarah Bartley (when she was Sarah Smith) “was briefly hailed as the succes­ sor of Sarah Siddons” (24). One of the reasons Baillie was so interested in this pair is that “the Bartleys hoped to perform Baillie’s work in North America during their 1818—19 tour,” including her 1798 tragedy on hatred, De Monfort (25). A famously retiring person who surprisingly attended the theater very little—including the productions of her own plays—nevertheless Baillie heartily entered into dialogue with other writers, especially female play­ wrights of the first third of the nineteenth century. This group is larger than one might expect: Mary Berry, Barbarina Dacre, Elizabeth Fletcher, Catherine Gore, Felicia Hemans, Margaret Holford, Frances (“Fanny”) Anne Kemble, and Barbarina Wilmot. Ever a supporter of and advocate for other women novelists, poets, and essayists as well, Baillie penned letters to Susan Ferrier, Anna Jameson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Rose Lawrence. Although Baillie declared to John Richardson in 1827 that she was “no reader at all, and could pass my life without books nearly as well as any countrywoman on the moors of Drumclog” (122), this self-assessment is not borne out by the letters. In fact, it is clear that if Baillie were going to make an evaluation of a friend’s or acquaintance’s work, her analysis would arise only after she had engaged the work with seriousness—and, in a num­ ber of cases, had read it several times. For instance, to Marry Berry she writes in 1828: “I have read your ‘View of the Social Life, &c,’ twice, and it has lost nothing, but rather gained, on the...

Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment (review)

Reviewed by: Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment Evan Gottlieb (bio) Pam Perkins. Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 320pp. US $86. ISBN 978-90-420-3137-1. This study of three Scottish women and the milieu in which they lived and wrote simultaneously deepens and partially revises our understanding of the place of female writers in Romantic-era Britain. In the early 1990s, studies such as Anne K. Mellor’s Romanticism and Gender (1993) demonstrated how representations of gender and sexuality were central to any critical understanding of “the Romantic ideology.” A few years later, critics began to ask a related question: if women’s issues had once been so central to the culture of British Romanticism, then what had happened to those female writers whose texts now had to be dug out of the archives to be reread? The collective answer, provided by critics such as Clifford Siskin, Catherine Gallagher, and Ina Ferris, was that women were pushed out of the market, and then out of the canon, by factors that included their own frequent (albeit overdetermined) choice to publish anonymously and the increasing professionalization of authorship that favoured their male competitors. As Pam Perkins ably demonstrates, this answer is productively complicated when we turn our critical attention to the successful careers enjoyed by many female Scottish authors throughout the Romantic era. Perkins focuses on three: Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Grant, and Christian Isobel Johnstone. First, however, Perkins lays out the salient aspects of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Edinburgh that facilitated their professional accomplishments. Whereas most Scots were keen to pro mote their erstwhile capital as “the Athens of the North,” Perkins notes that at least one anonymous novelist sneered that the remarkable literary productivity of its inhabitants also made it “the Birmingham of Literature” (18). Yet it was precisely this combination of Enlightened egalitarianism and a demystified, workaday approach to literary production that allowed women writers to prosper within the city’s literary culture. They also had a built-in advantage when it came to avoiding the increasingly dreaded label of “bluestocking,” benefitting from the general reputation of Scotswomen as “more modest and unassuming” than their English counterparts (37). Nevertheless, even north of the Tweed, Perkins asserts that a delicate balancing act was still required “for women who sought to establish a public, professional literary identity without overtly challenging their society’s ideas of femininity” (53). Each of the women whose careers Perkins considers found her own way to walk this socio-cultural tightrope. Although her first biographer made it appear that Hamilton more or less backed into her literary career, Perkins clearly demonstrates that her success was almost entirely [End Page 381] premeditated. Both of Hamilton’s initial novels, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), were pointed satires—“intellectually ambitious and often overtly polemical” (60)—which easily could have incurred the wrath of the male critical establishment. That they did not certainly owes something to their reactionary sensibilities, but it also speaks to Hamilton’s ability to convince readers that women could participate in contemporary political debates as an extension of, rather than an alternative to, their private lives. Although Perkins does not deny that most of Hamilton’s own ideas were hardly groundbreaking, she finds in her personal correspondence with some of the city’s most famous scientists further evidence of “Hamilton’s ability to blur the line between public intellectual work and private domesticity” (84). Even in Hamilton’s most characteristically Scottish novel, The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), Mrs MacClarty is laid low, not by any lack of domestic energy, but by “her moral and intellectual laziness” (127). It was precisely these kinds of Scottish subjects that Grant excelled at depicting. Yet Grant’s strategy for circumventing the barriers to success for literary women was in some respects the opposite of Hamilton’s: where the latter made clear that she was not to be mistaken for her characters, Grant cultivated a purposeful confusion between herself and her primarily Highland subjects. Letters from the Mountains (1806), which went through four editions in two years, details Grant’s experiences living near Inverness with her...

Blameless Empires and Long-Forgotten Melodies: Anne Grant's "The Highlanders," Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel , and the Poetry of Sympathetic Britishness

Blameless Empires and Long-Forgotten Melodies: Anne Grant's "The Highlanders," Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel , and the Poetry of Sympathetic Britishness

The Location of Empire: Anne Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady

Glasgow‐born Anne Grant has recently received critical attention for her Romantic‐era writing on the Scottish Highlands. Her most popular work in the United States, however, was the Memoirs of an American Lady (1808), which recounts Grant’s childhood experiences growing up in colonial upstate New York, where her father, an officer in the British army, was posted. In contrast to recent critical studies that have situated the Memoirs in an American, post‐revolutionary, pastoral tradition, I argue that Grant’s account of her early life is testament to the transnational and transperipheral circuits of movement and exchange in the British Atlantic world, circuits which make for complex instabilities of national, ethnic, and regional identities. Grant’s Memoirs – chronicling a childhood lived among a prominent Dutch family in Albany; Mohawks in the surrounding countryside; and Irish, Scots, and English in her father’s regiment – describes what can be termed a “translocality.” Grant’s childhood world is a polyglot world of indigeneity and emergent and receding empires, a world of confused and shifting allegiances and identities. In this, the Memoirs suggests that the cultural forms ascribed to our contemporary condition of global modernity are also recognizable in earlier stages of modern imperialism.

Perspectives on Travel Writing by Glenn Hooper, Tim Youngs

MLR, I0I.4, 2006 I075 Herman and Bart Vervaeck observe, one of the most important arguments in favour of structuralist narratology is that it encourages the literary critic to 'describe the workings of the narrative more satisfactorily' (p. iOO) and thus delve deeper into the relationship between form and content. In this respect, students of literary criticism still have much to learn from classical narratology. On the other hand, readings that are too formalistic can lead to a blindness to wards phenomena external to the text that influence the processes of narration. This is acknowledged inChapter 3, which is dedicated to a discussion of postmodern nar ratology, narratology and ethics, gender and narratology, and possible worlds. This is the weakest chapter in the book because it does not properly engage with liter ary critics who have sought to establish a link between a text's narrative form and wider ideology. Herman and Vervaeck deny that there is any 'compelling or causal connection between a formal textual element and a contextual, ideological element' (P. I32). They are not prepared tomake the leap of faith that somany literary critics do when forging a link between a narrative's formal structures and the wider cultural or ideological context. The authors' cautious scepticism and preference for amore scientifically defensible model for literary criticism reveal an underlying frustration with those critics who let their own subjectivity and ideological position inform their judgements. However, the authors acknowledge that we cannot have literary criticism without these since all literature requires a reader and a context. This contradiction remains unresolved by the end of this chapter. The Handbook ofNarrative Analysis therefore ultimately acknowledges that narratology remains beguiling precisely be cause no theory or model can ever completely map the creative processes involved in the production of narratives. UNIVERSITYOFBRISTOL CARAGH WELLS Perspectives on Travel Writing. Ed. by GLENN HOOPER and TIM YOUNGS. (Studies in European Cultural Transition, i9) Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2004. X+2IO pp. C45. ISBN O-7546-0366-o. This new collection is issued through the Ashgate Studies in European Cultural Transition series and presents eleven new essays which in their different ways engage with what the editors identify as the extreme fluidity of travel writing. Jan Borm opens the volume by arguing arrestingly that travel writing does not constitute a genre, but is rather a convenient umbrella term covering a diversity of works. In particular, he reminds the unwary reader-and the point cannot be made too often-that it is amis take to expect too much factual accuracy in this context. Helga Quadflieg elaborates on this position and also strikes akeynote theme of the volume when she proposes that early travellers such asRichard Hackluyt have a double subject: 'In exploring Others, these travellers explore themselves, and in describing Others they write themselves' (p. 29). Far from being a simple move abroad, travel writing thus should be read as a reflection on or interrogation of the traveller's own culture. Betty Hagglund explains Anne Grant's views of early nineteenth-century North America as being refracted through the imagery of children's story books and being shaped by contrasts with the Scottish Highlands. As the business of tourism developed, Glenn Hooper finds a particularly strident rhetoric promoting visits to Ireland around the time of the potato blight and interrogates the implications of the term 'prospects' for material change in that country. Many of the contributors focus their essays on cultural encounters. Jean-Yves Le Disez examines the tension between wildness and gentrification in ac counts of Brittany; Peter Hulme considers the impact of the USA on the Caribbean in the nineteenth century; and Erdmute Wenzel White describes writing on Brazil as Io76 Reviews instances of the 'fantastic made literal' (p. I02). Here travellers' fascination with the 'visible world' leads them to stress the exotic and the dangerous. The circumstances of travellers' lives can induce different forms of self-consciousness in their writings. Loredana Polezzi shows how British-born Estella Canziani adopts a series of Italian, British, and American identities in her account of Italy. And Padmini Mongia locates amulti-generic strategy inAmitav Ghosh which reflects the perceived 'impossibility of finding any pure traditions or...

Paradises Lost: Anne Grant and Late Eighteenth-Century Idealizations of America

Paradises Lost:Anne Grant and Late Eighteenth-Century Idealizations of America Pam Perkins (bio) The inhabitants of New York State in the troubled period between the Seven Years' War and the outbreak of open hostilities with Britain might have been surprised to hear that they were living in an earthly paradise. Yet a pre-adolescent Scottish girl who spent much of the 1760s following her father from one military post to another found Albany and the surrounding wilderness closer to an ideal world than anything she was to encounter at any other time in her life. At least, that was the way that she presented it some 40 years later, when, as an established author back in Britain, she wrote a memoir about her childhood experiences, lamenting the lost idyll of pre-Revolutionary America. While not well-known today, the writer in question, Anne Macvicar Grant, built a reputation for herself in the opening years of the nineteenth century as one of the foremost commentators on Highland Scottish culture. In 1808, however, Grant turned her attention back to the America she had known in her girlhood. Her Memoirs of an American Lady, ostensibly a biography of Catalina (or Margarita) Schuyler, a member of a distinguished Albany family, strays far beyond its rather obscure subject and turns into a wide-ranging account of pre Revolutionary life, incorporating personal memoir and both cultural and political history into its loose biographical narrative. Given this ambitious combination of subjects, it is somewhat surprising that where the Memoirs has attracted attention in American literary studies, it has done so as more or less straightforward history, mined for anecdotes about quaint colonial practices. Treating it in this way also requires highly selective reading, as Grant's vision of colonial life incorporates a deep awareness of the limitations of pastoralism as an ideological construct. Far from being a rosily warm evocation of a lost, simpler past, the American Lady belongs in a tradition of post-Revolutionary writing that explores the virtues and limitations [End Page 315] of the new American society through a representation of a vanished or forfeited idyll. In her account of paradises gained and lost, of childlike innocence, both individual and cultural, shattered by greed, war, and racial conflicts, Grant demonstrates the troubled complexity of the late eighteenth-century American pastoral and suggests, as she does so, both the cultural importance of a vision of pastoral innocence and the impossibility of maintaining it. It is not, of course, all that surprising that Grant, a patriotic Briton, would have found much to mourn when, in the opening years of the nineteenth century, she turned her thoughts back to 1760s America and started to reflect upon what she had lost.1 Yet the reception of the American Lady might tip us off that the results of those reflections are more complicated than one would expect of a self-proclaimed church-and-king Tory who hated almost everything about the Revolution. Even though Grant and her family—who had intended to settle in America—were ardently Loyalist in their politics, the book outraged at least some of those who might have been expected to share her perspective, and almost immediately upon publication, she found herself threatened with a lawsuit by the widow and daughter of a colonial administrator of whom she had spoken slightingly.2 The book was, in fact, more warmly received in the United States, where readers seem to have taken Memoirs of an American Lady as a piece of charming early Americana, something that might account for its otherwise rather odd appeal to them despite its overt hostility to the Revolutionary cause.3 It maintained at least some literary place there long after it had been forgotten in Britain: a Professor Garscombe of New York, who visited Edinburgh in 1819, was pleased to meet Anne Grant at a social gathering, commenting that "she is popular with us, from having given so agreeable an account" of her time in America (The Contrast 197). Some time later, James Fenimore Cooper's daughter included excerpts from the American Lady in an essay on her father's work, using it to provide a period backdrop for Cooper's...

From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749-1826. By Thomas Hallock. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xxii, 289 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2820-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078- 5491-3.)

From the Fallen Tree surveys the politics of environmental imagination from the late colonial era through the early national period. The literary historian Thomas Hallock focuses especially upon how his chosen texts register the interaction of the triumphal westward march of Euro-American settler culture; the rise of systematic, informed attention to the natural landscape, typically with the aid of (underac-knowledged) native and other subaltern local informants; and the emergence of a pastoral self-conception of the rootedness of national culture arising in part from a vicarious identification with the increasingly subjugated or evacuated indigenes, notwithstanding a certain lingering sense of guilt and accountability toward their displacement. Hallock examines a series of texts that loosely share an investment in a cartographic envisagement of regions that breaks down and eventually is abandoned under pressure of internal contradictions and data overload as national landscapes become more thickly described, settled, and mythified. Among these, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), John Filson's Kentucke (1784), William Bartram's Travels (1791), the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England and New-York (1821–1822), Anne Grant's (unjustly neglected) Memoirs of an American Lady (1808), and James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers (1823) are discussed at greatest length.

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Reality check: Scottish Executive director of human resources Mark Butler shadows emergency nurse practitioner Anne Grant at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary A&E following the launch of the RCN Nurses Deliver campaign in the run up to the Scottish parliamentary election in 2003.

Romantic women poets: an anthology

Romantic women poets: an anthology