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When Grant's friends organised the publication of her first collection of poems, they proclaimed in the prospectus that they had urged her to publish as much from 'a regard for the interests of Literature' as from 'their admiration of modest worth and Genius.' This is conventional rhetoric, and a number of the poems are fairly conventional examples of late eighteenth-century popular verse: the collection includes lines on friendship, inscriptions for rural retreats, and the almost inevitable tribute to Burns. Yet in the longer poems, Grant is far less predictable and seems to be trying to establish a place for herself somewhere between the vernacular tradition of Burns and the more self-consciously learned work of the Edinburgh literati. The most ambitious work, 'The Highlanders', which gave the title to the slightly revised collection of her poetry which Grant published in 1805 (The Highlanders and Other Poems), is a long account in heroic couplets of the history and culture of the Highland Scots, culminating with an account of the 1745 Jacobite uprising and its aftermath. Divided into five books and lavishly annotated, the poem is an essay in verse which shows traces of a somewhat unlikely combination of eighteenth-century literary influences: Macpherson, Thomson, Johnson, and Goldsmith, among others. Tone and subject matter are hardly less varied, ranging from straightforward descriptions of landscape to historical romance - as Grant describes the escape of Charles Edward Stuart - to satirical accounts of literary and political fashions of the early 1790s (the poem was composed mainly in 1795). Grant also experimented with informal, playful voices in verse epistles and journals addressed to friends. Suspicious as she was of what she saw as the unregulated sensibility of such contemporaries as Mary Robinson and Anna Seward, she attempted in her own poetry to combine seriousness of purpose with the light touch which she insisted necessarily characterised all her own verse, given her inability to devote herself to literary pursuits while overwhelmed with domestic duties.

Letters from the Mountains reads somewhat like a prose elaboration of the ethnographic and descriptive sections of 'The Highlanders'. Grant's greatest success, the letters in it span the period from 1773 to 1803, precisely the period which Scott, in his Afterword to Waverley, saw as marking the terminal decline of traditional Highland culture. Grant shows in her letters a remote world in which traditional superstitions and folk practices are still very much part of the lived culture (she reports with some amusement, for example, her dairymaid's wide-eyed account of a neighbouring clergyman's prophesying cow), but which is under siege by external pressures. What distinguishes the book from contemporary writing on the Highlands is the narrative perspective: not quite participant but not quite detached outsider either, Grant presents herself as a mediating voice from the boundaries between the dominant and the marginal cultures.

This is a position which she maintained in her two subsequent prose works, Memoirs of an American Lady (1808) and Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders (1811). The American Lady, the only one of her books to focus entirely on a subject other than Scottish history, culture, or literature, nonetheless reiterates many of Grant's points about Highland society in its presentation of the lives of both the Mohawks and, slightly less predictably, the white settlers and farmers whose world was overturned by the political turmoil leading up to the American Revolution. Catalina Schuyler, while the nominal subject of the book, is in fact presented as being merely a pre-eminent example of the nobly simple people who tried, unsuccessfully, to found a society in which, 'without the pride of property,' one could live with 'all the independence of proprietors' (AL 1: 11). The elegiac tone which is latent throughout Letters from the Mountains is much more explicit in both the American Lady and the Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, as in these books Grant describes not the living, if marginal and threatened, culture she presents in Letters from the Mountains, but one which has already vanished into the past. Yet the book vigorously defends the power of traditional Highland culture even while lamenting its disappearance. Still a passionate admirer of Ossian, Grant includes, along with the more ethnographic essays in Superstitions of the Highlanders, a defence of the authenticity of Ossian, which, if somewhat more cautious than an essay on the same topic that she had previously published (with her 1803 Poems), still indignantly rejects arguments that the poems betray more sophistication than could be found in a 'primitive' society. The Highlanders, Grant insists, managed to combine simple tastes and virtues with refined poetic imagination and sensibility, and, as such, offer contemporary Britons a model of uncorrupted refinement.

Grant's final publication, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen (1814) marks a return to the poetic ambition which had inspired 'The Highlanders,' although it differs markedly in tone from Grant's earlier works. It is an unabashedly political poem, but unlike Anna Laetitia Barbauld, who gloomily predicts Britain's cultural collapse in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Grant sees Britain as being on the verge of new cultural and imperial glory. Leaving aside her earlier fascination with marginal and primitive societies, Grant imagines England heading into the nineteenth century ruled by a wise and beloved queen - Queen Charlotte - whose reign will transcend the glory of those of Queens Elizabeth and Anne. Slavery, Grant predicts, will soon be outlawed, Scotland will continue to refine British culture, and Ireland will become a peaceful and industrious member of the British union, reformed by 'Thy own MARIA'S [Edgeworth's] manners-painting page' (91). Finishing with a survey of contemporary British poetry, in which she singles out Crabbe as well as her fellow Scots Thomas Campbell, Joanna Baillie, and Walter Scott for particular praise, Grant demonstrates in this final major work her ongoing passionate involvement with both the literary and political debates of her day.

This involvement, as her posthumously published letters show, continued throughout her life, even after she ceased publishing her own work. While she published very little formal criticism under her own name (her essays on Ossian are probably her most significant works in that genre), she was an intelligent and thoughtful reader of her contemporaries -- and of their critics. The posthumous letters record, for example, an ongoing engagement of some thirty years' duration with the ideas of Francis Jeffrey, whose critical acumen she admired but with whom she often disagreed. The letters also show her as a social commentator who was just as able to note and record the characteristics of an urban society of which she was unambiguously a part as she was the more remote and 'primitive' world of the Highlanders. Like memoir writers such as Henry Cockburn, Robert Chambers, and Eliza Fletcher, Grant offers, in her final letters, a detailed insider's view of Edinburgh literary society of the early nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Pam Perkins, University of Manitoba

© 1999 Pam Perkins / Sheffield Hallam University