Grant (née Macvicar), Anne

Anne Grant was a poet, essayist, and letter writer who became known mainly for her autobiographical and protoethnographic writing about the Highlands of Scotland. Born in Glasgow in 1755, Grant spent most of her childhood in America, returning to Scotland when she was 13. The letters that she wrote during an adolescent journey into the Highlands, and about her subsequent life in Fort Augustus and in the remote village of Laggan, formed the basis of her most successful work, Letters from the Mountains (1806), but she made her publishing debut as a poet. Poems on Various Subjects (1803), published by subscription, included both occasional verse drawn from events in Grant’s life and a lengthy and ambitious study of Highland history and culture, written in heroic couplets. It was successful enough to be reissued 5 years later in a retitled and slightly reorganized form. Grant was also an engaged reader of her contemporaries, although she saw her own poetic practice as being at odds with that of many of the other women poets of her generation. While she essentially stopped publishing after 1814 – her last publication other than a couple of anonymous reviews was a book-length poem about contemporary political issues that offered a conservative response to Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s pessimistic Eighteen Hundred and Eleven – Grant remained an active participant in Edinburgh literary society until her death in 1838, and her posthumously published letters from those years offer a lively glimpse of Romantic-era Edinburgh.