Anne MacVicar Grant
Anne MacVicar Grant (1755-1838) was an ethnographer before the invention of the term and undertook the task of mediating between cultures. She perhaps honed her skills as a cultural mediator during her childhood, when her father Duncan Macvicar’s army commission took the family from Glasgow to upstate New York during the Seven Years War. There Grant lived among Dutch settlers, British soldiers, French Huguenots, and Native Americans, particularly Mohawks. She describes this experience in Memoirs of an American Lady, an account of her beloved mentor Madam Schuyler. The MacVicars received a grand of land at the end of the war but returned to Glasgow in 1768 and moved to Strathmore three years later when Grant’s father took a post as barracks master at Fort Augustus. There she met and in 1779 married James Grant, clergyman in the neighboring parish of Laggan.
Grant spent the next twenty-two years in Laggan, where she learned enough Gaelic to be able to communicate with her husband’s parishioners, wrote poetry to entertain her friends and family, and gave birth to twelve children. At the time of her husband’s death in 1801, four of these children had died, and by the time of Grant’s own death in 1838, only one of the twelve survived her.
Her husband’s death left Grant in financial straits, and, after moving from Laggan to Stirling, she determined to publish some of the poetry that she had previously circulated in manuscript among her friends. Poems on Various Subjects was published by subscription in 1803. Many of the poems in this collection are what Grant calls “Memorials dear of loves and friendships past,” and bear the marks of their manuscript origins. Thanks to her family’s military connections, subscribers to the volume were situated as far away as India and the Caribbean. Like most works published by subscription, however, Grant’s doesn’t seem to have made a great deal of money. She then turned to prose, publishing Memoirs of an American Lady in 1806, Letters from the Mountains in 1807, and Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland in 1811.
Grant is best known today for this last work, in which she sought to explain Highlanders’ customs and manners to Lowland and English readers. Positioning herself against Enlightenment figures such as William Robertson, who had written about Highlanders without spending much time in the Highlands, she claimed a special authority to undertake this task of cultural translation. As “neither a native nor a stranger” to the Highlands, she brought a deep familiarity with Highlanders, acquired through a long residence among them, with the objective distance necessary to explain their ways to southern Britons. In the Essays and her earlier poem, “The Highlanders” (1803), Grant lamented the Clearances that were driving Highlanders from their homes. In an argument that isn’t very palatable to modern tastes, she claimed that the destruction of their crofting communities and the devastation of their age-old ways of life meant that Britain would also lose the immense military manpower that Highlanders had provided in defense of the British empire.
In 1810 Grant moved to Edinburgh, where she and her few surviving daughters took in a few young ladies as pupils. After publishing a long poem, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen (1814), Grant ceased to write for publication. However, her commonplace book, held at Edinburgh University Library, reveals that she continued to write poetry for her friends and family well into the 1820s.
Bibliography
Kenneth McNeil, Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760-1860 (Columbus: the Ohio State University Press, 2007).
Juliet Shields, “Highland Emigration and the Transformation of Nostalgia in Romantic Poetry,” European Romantic Review 23:6 (2012): 765-784.