25 Anne Grant.Pdf

Anne firant (Mrs. Grant of Laggan) (1755-1838) The poet and nonfiction writer who would do more than any other writer, with the exception of Walter Scott, to dispel the general prejudice against the Scottish Highlanders was born Anne Macvicar on 2r February 1755 in Glasgow. Her mother was a descendant of an ancient family, the Stewarts of lnvernahayle, and her father, Duncan Macvicar, was an officer in a Highland regiment. In 1757 Anne's father left to join his company in America, where the French and Indian War was then raging. The next year Anne crossed the Atlantic with her mother, and the two settled temporarily in Albany, New York, before taking the perilous journey up the Mohawk River in 1760 to Oswego to join her father, who fought at Ticonderoga. Her mother taught her to read, and she studied the Old Testament as a storybook. Because of his religious beliefs her father discouraged literary pursuits, and her mother insisted that she occupy her time with needlework. In 1762, peace having been declared between Britain and France, her father's regiment returned to Albany. There Anne discovered Milton's Paradise Lost and spent two winters with the distinguished Catalina Schuyler, who introduced her to the works of Shakespeare, Pope, Addison, and others. Later she recalled, "Whatever cul ture my mind has received I owe to her." 1 In 1765 her father retired from the army on half-pay, and the British government granted him and his fellow officers two thousand acres apiece. Captain Macvicar took his own allotment in Vermont and bought cheaply the surrounding plots of other officers re turning to England, planning to settle with his family on the resulting large estate. But, dogged by ill-health, in 1768 he returned with his family to Scotland. Fourteen-year-old Anne arrived in Glasgow without any of the fashionable feminine "accomplishments" but with a love and understanding of nature, a familiarity with books, and extraordinary travel experience. The r. Anne Grant, Letters from the Mountains, 2 vols., 6th ed. (London, r845), I :no. Anne Grant estate in Vermont was subsequently confiscated during the American Revo lution, thus ending what Anne Grant later facetiously termed "The History of an Heiress." In 1773 the family moved to Fort Augustus, in Inverness, on the banks of Loch Ness, where Anne's father had been made barrack master. In May of 1779 she married the Reverend James Grant, former chaplain at the fort, who had become pastor to the parish of Laggan, a remote village fifty miles from both Perth and Inverness. Superintendence of their farm, which made them self-sustaining, as well as care of the twelve children eventually born to the couple all devolved upon her. Highlanders were not accepting of outsiders, so Anne Grant won her neighbors over by adopting Highland customs, learning the native Gaelic, and teaching it to her children in their infancy. She enjoyed her surroundings and the poetic beauty of the Gaelic language so much that she began translating Gaelic verse. While she was generally happy in Laggan, the years there were saddened by the deaths of four of her children. In 1801 Anne's husband died, and she found that she had been left in debt with eight children to support and only a small pension due to her as the widow of a military chaplain. Friends decided to gather the poems she had written for their entertainment and publish them by subscription. With the active patronage of the duchess of Gordon, Poems on various Subjects (1803) garnered three thousand subscribers. Among the thirty-two poems were translations of Gaelic songs, including Grant's words to "Oh Where, Tell Me Where, Is Your Highland Laddie Gone?" which her first stanza answers, "He's gone with streaming banners, where noble deeds are done,/ And my sad heart will tremble, till he come safely home." The New Annual Register praised the book for "evincing a very creditable portion of poetic animation, a refined taste, and a feeling heart." 2 The Anti-Jacobin Review criticized her sometimes unhappy word choice, faulty grammar, and the lack of unity of the central work, "The Highlanders," but also noted that "in liveliness of fancy, and in richness of imagery, as well as of expression [the poems] frequently abound. They display, too, very considerable stores of acquired knowledge, with great acuteness of observation." 3 The Monthly Magazine contended that "there is a strain of simplicity and unaffected feeling in these poems which will give them a permanent interest." 4 Grant's daughter Mary's illness in 1802 took her to Bristol Hotwells, and in June 1803 she reluctantly left Laggan for Woodend, near Stirling. When her son Duncan received a commission in the East India Company, she was 2. 24 (r803): 328. 3. r6 (October 1803): rr6-rr7. 4. Suppl., r6 (r5 January r804): 632. Anne Grant 253 faced with how to raise money to outfit him. Her friends suggested that she publish a selection of her letters. Accordingly, in January r805 she went to London, where she met Joanna Baillie and Catherine Maria Fanshawe and took her manuscript to Longman and Rees. Within a few days, Letters from the Mountains was accepted; though personal material had been edited out, with its lively descriptions of rural Scottish scenery, legends, and manners, the book became the rage in the summer of 1806, making her a celebrity and bringing her a tidy profit. The second edition paid her an additional three hundred pounds. But she was not allowed for long to enjoy her triumph: in April 1807 her daughter Charlotte died at the age of seventeen, and in July of that same year her twenty-year-old daughter Catherine died. Perhaps to distract herself, Grant set down her recollections of her early mentor, Catalina Schuyler, and of life in Albany, New York, before the Revo lution. Published in 1808 as Memoirs ef an American Lady, the book sold well in both Britain and America, though it did not enjoy the same vogue in Britain as Letters from the Mountains. Also in r8o8 she published The Highlanders, and Other Poems, whose title poem sought to detail for a largely ignorant English reading public the Scottish highland way oflife. The New Annual Register said, "There is much smoothness and elegance, and some beautiful and appropri ate descriptions in these poems; but it is to her prose, and not to her poetry, that this lady must chiefly look for success." 5 The Edinburgh Review deemed her poetry "really not very good" and called "The Highlanders" "heavy and uninteresting." 6 But the Eclectic Review observed of Grant that "her imagi nation is always animated and not infrequently sublime; and her sentiments alternate between a gaiety which will exhilarate, and a pensiveness which will soften, every reader of sensibility." 7 In the spring of 1809 Grant met Walter Scott in Edinburgh, where she moved with her family in March 1810 and started a small school. Her pro motion of the Highlands and of the Gaelic language made her a celebrity in the Scottish literary capital; she was known, too, for her wit and conversa tion, so that despite her Tory leanings, her home became a gathering place for writers of all political persuasions, including Frances Jeffrey, John Wil son (Christopher North), Henry Mackenzie, Felicia Hemans, Robert Southey, Joanna Baillie, Thomas Campbell, Walter Scott, George Ticknor, James Hogg, and Robert Owen. Before the secret was well known, many suspected Grant of being the author of the Waverley novels. Capitalizing on the interest in Scottish rural life, Grant published in r8n 5. 29 (1808): 406. 6. 18 (August 18n): 481. 7. 4 (November 1808): 1034. 254 Anne Grant her Essays on the Superstition of the Highlands of Scotland, with Translations from the Gaelic, and in 1814 she published a long poem, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen, which the Universal Magazine panned with the observation, "The events of the last year deserved to be recorded in language that may never perish; but we are afraid Mrs. Grant's well meant effort will hardly survive the present year." 8 The British Critic was appreciative, however, noting, "There is easy and graceful flow throughout the whole, and in many parts a neatness and point, which remind us strongly of Pope.9 In 1821 the Highland Society of London awarded her their gold medal for the best "Essay on the Past and Present State of the Highlands of Scotland." Grant was permanently disabled by a fall in 1820, but in 1825 Sir Walter Scott, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Mackenzie, and others successfully petitioned King George IV to give her a small pension on the civil establishment of Scotland. Her later life was darkened by the successive deaths of all of her remaining children except her youngest son, John-Peter Grant, who in 1844 published her autobiography and letters an important record of literary life and society in Edinburgh. She died of influenza on 7 November 1838 at the age of eighty-four and was buried in the New Cemetery of Edinburgh's St. Cuthbert's Church. Walter Scott had said of her, "Her literary works although composed amidst misfortune and privation, are written at once with simplicity and force, and uniformly bear the stamp of a virtuous and courageous mind." 10 MAJOR WORKS: Poems on Various Subjects (Edinburgh, London, Glasgow, Perth, Aber deen, Elgin, and Inverness, 1803); Letters from the Mountains, being a Selection from the Author's Correspondence with her Intimate Friends from 1773 to 1804. 3 vols. (London, 1806); The Highlanders, and Other Poems (London, 1808); Memoirs of an American Lady, with Sketches of Manners and Scenery in America as They Existed Previous to the Revolution (Lon don, 1808); Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland (London, 1811); Eigh teen Hundred and Thirteen: A Poem, in Two Parts (Edinburgh and London, 1814); Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs.

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