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In a brief account of his mother, Anne Grant's one-time pupil Joan Glassell, the eighth Duke of Argyll described Grant as a 'well-known ... even a celebrated woman' in her own day (Autobiography 1: 52). This passage, published in the early twentieth century, is an indication of both Grant's great success during her own lifetime and the relatively rapid evaporation of her fame after her death. Grant's reputation seems to have survived to the middle years of the century, if not much beyond: John Peter Grant's posthumous three-volume collection of her letters (1844) went into a second edition almost immediately, and in memoirs written between 1845 and 1854, Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus (no relation) was still referring to the 'celebrated' Mrs. Grant (2: 189) without further explanation [1].
It was Letters from the Mountains which made this reputation; indeed, the other works were often seen as being little more than glosses on or expansions of that book. Yet however overshadowed it was by the letters, Grant's first publication, Poems on Various Subjects, also achieved surprising financial success as well as some mild critical praise. It was published by subscription, and while Grant's claim that she had three thousand subscribers is perhaps a little hyperbolic (ML 1: 17), the British Critic reviewer still thought it 'one of the most copious and respectable list of subscribers' he had seen (Vol. 22: 292) [2]. More specifically, the reviewer also praised the versification - 'good, though perhaps not of the first order' - and the morality of the poems. Grant's work, he thought, would be, like that of the novelist Jane West, 'a lasting monument of female genius and good sense, exerted without any neglect of the humbler tasks of middle life' (Vol. 22: 294, 297). Letters from the Mountains, following three years later, initially attracted more popular success than critical attention. A brief early notice in the Critical Review dismissed it as an oddity which could not 'be expected to interest the public' (Vol. 9, s.3: 221), but by the time the British Critic found occasion to review it in 1808, the book was already going into a fourth edition, and most of the notice was devoted to an attempt to explain why such an apparently unpresuming work 'so warmly interested [readers'] feelings' (Vol. 31: 608).
That the letters did interest readers a great deal seems indisputable. Four editions in two years are not enough to rank the book with the truly phenomenal publishing successes of that era - Waverley, by way of contrast, went into four editions within six months - but it was a considerable achievement, all the more so for its success being entirely a surprise. Grant herself claimed to have 'expected very little indeed' from the letters, 'unless the odd Title should make way for it, into Circulating Libraries, under the mistake of supposing it a novel' (BL Add. mss 39871, f97v). Yet despite her self-deprecation, she was concerned about reviews and about the aesthetic success of her work. She forgave reviewers who criticised her work 'like a Christian,' she told her daughter, but wrote to a friend that 'it betrays hardihood, insolence, and indeed some hypocrisy, to affect indifference about public opinion, when one has once left the safe and peaceful shades of privacy' (MC 1: 63; LM 3: 183). Grant might have been driven to publication by financial need, but she clearly wanted recognition as a serious writer as well. While pleased by sales of her poems, she commented that she felt 'a sense of humiliation' in reflecting that she owed part of their success to compassion or charity (MC 1: 17), and she took her work seriously enough to be annoyed by the Edinburgh Review's neglect of Letters from the Mountains. As she observed impatiently to a friend who was 'not singular' in being surprised at 'the silence of the Edinburgh Review,' the new school of critics exemplified by Jeffrey 'cannot conceive how a man should have either valour or compassion without learning it at school [and] on the same principle ... treat female genius and female productions with unqualified scorn' (MC 1: 80-81).
Yet Jeffrey wrote what was unquestionably the most important critical commentary on Anne Grant's work to appear during her lifetime, a review of Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders which was also a retrospective essay on Grant's career. (Edinburgh Review, vol. 18 [1811] 480-510). The review was mixed; while Jeffrey was coolly dispassionate in exploring what he saw as Grant's weaknesses - limited subject matter, a degree of affectation in her style, and an 'ill-regulated fancy' (482) - he nonetheless praised her 'very popular and meritorious volumes' and placed Letters from the Mountains 'among the most interesting collections of real letters that have lately been given to the public' (480). What was most significant about Jeffrey's review, however, was his insistence upon the value of Grant's presentation of a fresh, unmediated vision of the Scottish landscape and Highland culture. She was, in other words, recognised by one of her most influential literary contemporaries as an authoritative voice from what was rapidly becoming a very fashionable margin, that of Highland and rural Scotland. Nor was Jeffrey alone in his opinion of her work. Scott paid her a polite tribute at the end of Waverley and referred readers of The Antiquarian to one of her 'fine translation[s] from the Gaelic' (359). George Thomson, Burns' lyricist and the compiler of several volumes of national songs, wrote Grant that her contributions to his book of Scottish songs 'put me so strongly in mind of my own Burnes [sic], as to make me think almost that he is restored to me' (British Library Add. Ms. 35266, f. 27v). Admittedly, this was a private compliment and, moreover, one which was not likely to go to Grant's head, as Thomson immediately followed his praise with a page of detailed suggestions for revision.
The other quality for which Grant's contemporaries praised her writing was its morality. The petition submitted to the king for her pension (signed by Jeffrey, Scott, Henry Mackenzie, William Arbuthnot, Robert Liston, and George Baird) proclaims that, Her literary works, although composed amidst misfortune and privation, are written...with force and simplicity, and uniformly bear the stamp of a virtuous and courageous mind, recommending to the reader that patience & fortitude which the author herself has practiced in such an eminent degree .... Mrs. Grant's writings have produced a strong and salutary effect upon her countrymen... (British Library Add. Ms. 38, 300 f. 12)
This perception that Grant's writings - and Grant herself - were perhaps most valuable as moral exemplars is reinforced by other comments by her contemporaries. Scott's private view, expressed in his journal, was that while the pension was 'merited by [Grant's] works as an authoress,' she deserved it more for her 'firmness and elasticity of mind' in the face of great personal tragedy (Journal 21). Similarly, while Henry Cockburn was temperate in his praise of Letters from the Mountains - 'an interesting treasury of good solitary thoughts' - he was much warmer in his account of Grant herself, who was, he writes admiringly, 'always under the influence of an affectionate and delightful enthusiasm, which, unquenched by time or sorrow, survived the wreck of many domestic attachments' (Memorials 259-60). Christian Isobel Johnstone, reviewing John Peter Grant's posthumous edition of letters, thought that the book's 'most permanent' value was that it 'shows how the deepest affliction may be borne by a pious and reasonable mind' (Tait's 11 n.s.: 180).
This emphasis on the moral value of Grant's life and writings is a reminder that, shaped as she was by her childhood in the America of the Seven Years' War, Anne Grant died a Victorian. While her publishing career lasted barely a dozen years, her writing life ran from 1773 to 1838 and reflects the changing literary tastes of those years. The wild Ossianic melancholy of the early 1770s modulates by the 1830s into pious accounts of edifying deathbeds and fears that cholera has been sent to scourge a sinful nation. Her writing also coincides with the rise of what Scott called 'tartan fever.' She first travelled into the Highlands in the spring of 1773, six months before Johnson and Boswell made their famous journey into what was then almost unknown territory; she witnessed firsthand the 1810 tourist boom in the Trossachs sparked by the publication of The Lady of the Lake; and, in the 1820s and 30s, she hosted numerous English and American friends as they made their way through Edinburgh en route to what was, by then, the almost obligatory picturesque tour through the Highlands. In addition to whatever her contemporaries found in her work, Grant thus offers twentieth-century readers a body of writing which becomes, in effect, a survey of some of the dominant themes of Scottish literature over the course of a half century which saw major shifts in literary taste.
Yet Grant deserves attention as more than a curiosity of literary history. While she chose never to attempt fiction, her poetry and essays about Highland culture place her with the group of early nineteenth-century regional novelists, a number of whom (notably Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, and Mary Brunton) she either knew or admired. Like them, she used her writing to explore the place of minority cultures in the wider British world. As her contemporaries recognised, she was not only a thoughtful observer of the cultures she described but an active participant in them, and, as such, she offers a perspective which differs just as much from what she saw as the didactic theorising of straightforwardly political writers as it does from the occasionally wild romance of the novelists. More perhaps than any of the other regionalists of her generation, Grant consciously and explicitly attempts to speak as both a member of a marginal culture and as an active participant (even if one marginalized by gender and economic circumstance) in the dominant society. Neither insider nor outsider, as she explains herself in her introduction to Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, she offers those alert to cultural nuance a voice which attempts to bring together the centre and the margin in early nineteenth-century Britain, even as, throughout her work, she remains continually alert to problems of cultural difference.
Notes
[1] Elizabeth Grant also indirectly indicates the extent of Anne Grant's contemporary fame when she says rather unkindly of another writer, Mrs. Grant of Duthill, that she 'had but one aim in life -- to rival the fame of Mrs Grant of Laggan' (1: 106).
[2] The DNB repeats this claim, but three random pages of the thirty-page subscription list average 71 subscribers per page, which, when an short extra list from Ceylon is figured in, makes around 2300 a more reasonable estimate of the number of subscribers.
Bibliography
Pam Perkins, University of Manitoba
© 1999 Pam Perkins / Sheffield Hallam University
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