That account of the origins of Grant's career is accurate in all the main points, but there are a number of other factors that make it impossible to see her simply as a retiring, domestic woman who stumbled into her successful literary career through accident and financial desperation. Grant, an apparently indefatigable letter writer, left a large archive of published and unpublished correspondence in which she discusses in great detail aspects of her career and her attitudes towards literary production. Indeed, taken as a whole, Grant's correspondence represents one of the most full existing accounts of a literary life by a British woman of her generation. More specifically, it demonstrates the sophisticated aesthetic and professional knowledge undergirding even such an apparently straightforward attempt to earn money by bringing together and publishing scattered, amateur compositions. These letters also indicate the qualities that Grant valued in poetry -- both her own and that of other writers -- and show how she saw her work as fitting into a specifically Scottish literary tradition as well as the wider tradition of women's writing. Indeed, despite her insistence upon her own amateur status and repeated proclamations that she wrote entirely from the impulse of the moment and without study, Grant was thoroughly steeped in other writing of the day, both by canonical figures and by other writers in her circle of acquaintance.

It is easy to overestimate the cultural isolation of Anne Grant, not least because she promoted her work by emphasising that she was a voice from the cultural margins, a claim supported by her biography. Raised in upstate New York, she spent her young womanhood in Fort Augustus and the twenty-two years of her married life in the remote Highland village of Laggan. Yet her correspondence, mainly with the friends in Glasgow for whom she wrote many of the poems that she eventually published, ensured that she was not entirely isolated. Just as importantly, it apparently gained her a number of literary contacts long before she published a word. It seems very likely that she built a minor reputation for herself in Glasgow literary circles by this circulation of her work in manuscript, although it is impossible to say how widely her poems were read. While there has been a considerable amount of research done on manuscript circulation of poetry among the aristocratic coteries of seventeenth-century women writers, there is not yet much understanding of how such informal exchanges worked among middle-class women a century later. Even so, Grant's case indicates that informal manuscript exchange could offer women poets both an audience for their own poetry and a chance to develop their critical skills by reading others' work. Her correspondence with Mary Macintosh, for example, almost certainly offered Grant access to other readers and writers of poetry, as Macintosh, a sister of the novelist Dr. John Moore, moved in literary circles and took a keen interest in Grant's writing. There is no direct evidence that Macintosh or other friends introduced Grant to other writers during her visits to Glasgow, but it would be surprising if they did not, as it is clear that such introductions were provided for members of Grant's family. It was, for example, while staying in Glasgow in the early 1790s that Grant's eldest daughter, Mary, met a number of people with literary interests, possibly including the young Francis Jeffrey, who indulged in an playful exchange of verses with her.[2] It is also clear from one of Grant's letters that Mary Grant attracted interest in her Glasgow circles as a promising young poet, and it is unlikely that the mother received any less attention than the daughter.[3]

Nor was such literary correspondence limited to providing Grant with a wider readership for her own unpublished poetry. Grant read and discussed with Mary Macintosh manuscript poems by at least one other aspiring woman writer, a Miss J.C., who is almost certainly the young lady to whom Grant addressed one of the poems that she later published. (There cannot be too many young women poets whom Grant thought comparable to Collins.) Yet whether or not the "Jane" of the poem and the "J.C." of the letter are the same writer,[4] both letter and poem provide valuable evidence of the ways in which, even in tiny, isolated Laggan, Grant was able to participate in a wider literary culture. In an undated letter to Macintosh, probably circa 1795, Grant writes:

I have been agreeably surprised by the perusal of some compositions of Miss J.C., which, for originality of thought, power of imagination, and splendour of diction, exceed any thing I have ever seen in manuscript. -- The fault I would find with them is a profusion of ornament. -- It is not tinsel, but there is too much of it. -- She appears to have inherited a portion of Ben Collins's mantle. -- She should attend to his ode to Simplicity,

"The flowers that sweetest breathe,
Tho' genius cull the wreathe,
Still ask her hand to range their order'd hues."
But she is very young, and every way a wonder, I am told.[5]

The simple fact that Grant was being sent poems by promising young authors whom she knew only by reputation is noteworthy in itself; Grant's response is more so. Her measured praise and reservations about the excessive "ornament" in the style -- a quality that she always disliked and insisted she avoided in her own work -- indicates that she took such unpublished poetry seriously. She read it critically, and she assumed that her correspondents were sufficiently serious themselves to value critical response.

The poem is, at least on one level, more straightforward in its praise; it was probably sent or at least intended to be sent to the young woman in question. (Grant commissioned Thomson to forward to Mrs. Dunlop an anonymous copy of the poem addressed to her before it appeared in print.[6]) Yet it reserves its compliment for the last line; the body of the poem is a brief survey of poetic traditions. The poem puts less emphasis on the poetic skills of "Jane," who is present only in the title and in the last word, than on the speaker's literary taste, something that makes it a very different work in its published form than it would be as an enclosure in a private letter. After all, the only trace of either the otherwise nameless Jane or her poetry lies in the narrator's response to the unpublished verses, which would presumably be as mysterious to most of Grant's readers in 1803 as they are to us today. In its published form, the poem is less about the specific poetry that inspired it than it is about the act of reading: what it illustrates is not the gifts of the woman who is the occasion of the poem, but rather the author's ability to use other poets, canonical and unknown, as an inspiration for her own writing.

It would be a mistake to build too large an argument on what is, after all, one of the shorter and less ambitious poems in the collection. Grant herself told Thomson that most of her poems were "too Slight & too Local for the Publick eye; being merely a History of the Feelings & Domestic Occurences of a most Obscure individual."[7] Yet as one can see by a glance at The Highlanders, the centrepiece of the 1803 volume, Grant did not limit herself to light occasional verse merely because she was writing for private circulation. The Highlanders is poetry with grand ambitions: it aims to be nothing less than a survey of Highland topography, culture, and history, complete with an overarching moral argument to draw the disparate sections together. Writing Mary Macintosh in March 1795, Grant described the poem as being "rural, but by no means pastoral, but rather anti-pastoral. It will be very impolitic and unpopular, and though free from personal satire, too true to be endured."[8] This ambition is all the more striking, as in her headnote to the poem, Grant explains that it was written to amuse herself while recovering from an illness in the winter of 1795 (the illness followed the difficult birth of her youngest daughter, Moore). The poem as it stands was apparently completed only in 1802, and was certainly substantially revised then, in accordance with suggestions from George Thomson. Nonetheless, however much of it was composed in 1795, it must have been a demanding project for a woman in poor health with eight children under the age of fifteen. That it was Grant's idea of relaxation in such circumstances suggests an interest in -- even a dedication to -- poetry that is somewhat at odds with her resolute declarations of amateurism. Moreover, it suggests that she was prepared to make demands upon her audience: The Highlanders is not, and could not have been in any form, an elegant trifle to amuse distant friends. It aims to instruct, and it is passionate in its advocacy for the Highland way of life. Nor is that the only poem written for friends and private circulation in which Grant attempted serious cultural analysis. A lost work of which she was evidently proud -- she told Thomson that it was the poem she believed would have "the Greatest Chance of generally Pleasing" -- was an attempt to describe "Canadian Manners & Landscape."[9] Grant clearly enjoyed writing light, conventionally ladylike poetry on ephemeral topics - a lost garter or an invitation to an oyster supper - but she was no less inclined to write and circulate lengthy, serious poetic explorations of culture and ethnography.

Such exchanges and contacts do not mean that Grant was any less isolated in her day-to-day life or that she had extensive opportunities for literary conversation. Yet manuscript circulation of her poems, over a quarter of a century, meant that she was not entirely a novice when she finally did decide to publish: she had served a literary apprenticeship. The point is worth stressing, as it is easy to assume that success in a subscription publication by a previously unpublished author must have been merely a matter of charity or luck, something that downplays the work that Grant did as she honed her skills and built a network of patrons over more than two decades. It must have been at least partly as a result of that work that she was able to launch her career with a degree of success that was atypical of the "lady writers" who attempted to make a little extra money with a volume of genteel subscription poetry. The length of the subscription list itself makes Grant's volume stand out from others of its type. The reviewer for The British Critic thought it "one of the most copious and respectable list of subscribers" he had ever seen, while The Anti-Jacobin proclaimed that "a list of subscribers so uncommonly numerous," including "many of the most distinguished [people] in the united Kingdom" created very "high expectations" indeed.[10] Although Grant was exaggerating (or misremembering) when she later boasted about her 3000 subscribers (the actual number is 2251), the list is impressive by any standards. George Thomson wrote encouragingly to Harriet Liston, one of the friends collecting subscriptions, that he thought they might get as many as a thousand subscribers before the book went to press.[11] The fact that the final list more than doubles Thomson's optimistic predictions suggests the startling degree of Grant's success. Nor, as The Anti-Jacobin noted, was the quantity of subscribers the only striking point about the list, which included an array of prominent literary figures as well as a very large number of the aristocratic patrons whose money and social power were vital to any such undertaking. Whether or not most of these people were subscribing merely from charity, the number and social range of people buying the book might have laid the groundwork not only for immediate financial relief but also for future literary success, as the poems reached potential readers far beyond the relatively small circle of Scottish literary friends who had first encouraged Grant's move into print.

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If Grant's career, when she finally launched it, was helped by the network she was able to build up during her years of informal, amateur writing, her success was no doubt also given a considerable boost by her subject matter. The Highland world about which Grant wrote became very fashionable during the years in which she was publishing, although the popularity of her subject seemed to be more a matter of good luck on her part than of any particular attentiveness to literary fashion, as she started writing some decades before Britain developed a full-blown case of what Scott was to call "tartan fever." Indeed, Grant's first poems and letters date from the 1770s, and while there were then already a number of popular and influential works on the Highlands to inspire her, there were also some formidable anti-Scots prejudices that might have deterred her, had she been attentive to such matters, as a number of contemporary anecdotes indicate. For example, according to the English actor John Jackson, David Garrick cancelled a 1760s London production of John Hume's Douglas because anti-Scottish feelings were running so high that Garrick feared a riot at the appearance of Highland costume on an English stage. (Jackson, who had somewhat tastelessly planned to thrill the audience by appearing in the title role wearing genuine Highland military gear scavenged in the aftermath of Culloden, could only wonder, looking back on his disappointment, that he "should live to see the tartan plaid ... the predominating fashion among all ranks of people in the metropolis."[12]). Nor was Garrick unduly cautious; around the same time as Jackson had to forego his chance to dazzle in Douglas, the young James Boswell was moved to an outburst of his rather sporadic Scottish patriotism when, at another play, a group of Scottish officers were hissed by the audience.[13]

That this situation had changed so dramatically by the time that Grant began publishing of course owed a great deal to political changes (the anti-Scottish mood of the 1760s had originated in large part because of a deeply unpopular Scottish prime minister). Yet literature also played a role, as in their very different ways, James Macpherson and Samuel Johnson helped to spark, during Grant's adolescence and young womanhood, what rapidly became an apparently insatiable interest in the remoter corners of Scotland. Macpherson's gently melancholy Celts convinced large numbers of British readers that Scotland offered great British art that was both impressively ancient and appealing to contemporary sensibilities. Johnson's decidedly more sceptical view of the Highlands launched vehement debates about Scottish culture and landscape that doubtless helped (among other things) to provide a readership for the numerous other books about Scotland that appeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

It was in this context that Anne Grant began her writing career and began to shape a niche for herself in what, by the 1780s and 90s, was already becoming a crowded literary market. Her first literary efforts were the letters that she wrote during her own travels through and residence in the Highlands, a journey she began only a few months before Johnson and Boswell set out on their more famous tour. If the Highlands were still relatively unknown territory at the time, she was nonetheless steeped in the language and sensibility of the Ossian poems before she set out on her travels, and so her views of the Highlands were from the beginning filtered through literary antecedents as well as personal experience. This combination of learned expertise and direct knowledge was one that Grant fully exploited. Born in Glasgow of Argyllshire parents, she had in fact never seen the Highlands until she was seventeen and went there with her father, an ardently Whig soldier in the British army. Nor did she learn any Gaelic until after she was twenty and had already been in Fort Augustus for three years. In part (as she later argued) as a result of her status as a linguistic outsider, the landscape and culture initially failed to appeal, despite the high expectations created by James Macpherson's "translations" of Ossian.[14] Yet she was not entirely a foreigner, as she could claim solid Jacobite and Highland antecedents. Her mother's uncle was, according to her son, the figure on whom Scott based his ardent lowland Jacobite, Baron Bradwardine. (Admittedly, this claim was disputable; Lady Nairne's biographer claimed the same of one of his subject's uncles.[15]) Nor was Scott the only romancer of the Scottish Highlands inspired by one of Grant's family: James Stewart, another maternal relative, was executed for the murder that, nearly a century and a half after it took place, Robert Louis Stevenson was to use as the centrepiece of Kidnapped. More importantly, as she learned the language and grew accustomed to the scenery, Grant began to develop other than merely ancestral connections to her new home, even while never quite losing the perspective of an outsider in her forebears' land. Thus, as a member of both the dominant and minority cultures, Grant proclaimed herself uniquely qualified to interpret, for a wider British audience, a fascinating and foreign society within their borders.

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The "foreignness" that Grant used as a selling point for English and lowland readers of her books might, admittedly, be easy for twenty-first century readers to miss. Her major poetic exploration of her adopted homeland, The Highlanders, can today seem rather oddly anachronistic when set against the more canonical Romantic long poems and, in its old-fashioned manner, very much in the tradition of the standard eighteenth-century canon. As readers noted at the time, its heroic couplets and formal diction recall the nature poetry of Pope or Goldsmith - poets as far removed from Ossianic conscious archaism as they are from Grant's Romantic contemporaries. Yet Grant is no belated Augustan. If her language can seem decorously conventional, the familiarity of the versification and diction is offset by Grant's attempt to use that familiar eighteenth-century style to convey a sense of a culture almost as far removed as possible from neo-classical decorum.

There is no doubt that Grant considered herself distinctly out of step with contemporary poetic fashion, which she saw as being predominantly urban and feminine. "Who that admires Mrs P. or Miss S. will ever tolerate me?" she asked Thomson rhetorically.[16] Her poems would, she observes gloomily, have appealed more widely had she included more descriptive passages and more ornamental tricks of style. As matters stood, she feared that the best that she could hope for would be that the "correct chastity and scrupulous fidelity" of her writing would appeal to a few discerning readers.[17] Grant's comments about the "chastity" of her writing might be slightly misleading, however, as far from worrying that she is too feminine to be successful as a poet, she goes on to explain that her real weakness is that despite current literary fashion for "tinsel," her own predilections lead her poetry towards "that severe and masculine truth of taste which rejects superfluous ornament." As she concludes,

Arcadian images would please more; but verisimilitude will please longer. Misses will not put my book in their work-bag; but, as longevity is the portion of truth, it may work its way into light, and lie on the tables of their grandsons; and this not as a fine poem, but a correct drawing.

Even while doubtful about the likelihood of her own success, Grant is in no way prepared to see her writing as suffering from any lapse into literary conventionality, and especially not from the sort of the weaknesses attributed to popular women's poetry of the day. If her poems fail, she implies, it will be because they are too starkly, uncompromisingly unfeminine to appeal to the frivolous tastes of her contemporaries.

As the contemporary reviews indicate, Grant was unduly pessimistic about her reception. At a time when most unknown poets could count on a notice of no more than a paragraph or two, sometimes even only a sentence or two, Grant was given a number of comparatively lengthy and thoughtful reviews. Here again she was helped by Thomson, who instructed her to send copies to the editors of major periodicals -- something that she would never have thought of doing herself, she wrote gratefully to a mutual friend. Even so, such publicity seeking was clearly not something that came easily to Grant, and it is important not to overstate her confidence about the virtues of her own poetry. She repeatedly mentioned her fear of reviews in letters to friends and was very grateful for private reassurance. When her friend Helen Dunbar forwarded praise from Elizabeth Rose of Kilavrock, a cousin and correspondent of Henry Mackenzie, Grant was effusively grateful for the encouragement, particularly given Mrs. Rose's reputation as a woman of discerning literary taste. Even while rejecting, with some indignation, the bare suggestion that her poetry would appeal to popular taste in the way that Williams' or Seward's did, she was keen - as any writer would be - for sympathetic and intelligent appreciation of her work.

Grant would have had reason to be pleased by her generally favourable reception, but there are indications that she was not entirely mistaken in thinking her work would not be properly appreciated, especially in England. Most of the reviewers' complaints are predictable criticisms of slips in grammar or unnecessarily prosaic constructions. Yet however close we might find her poetry to the mainstream British poetic idiom, she was clearly too Scottish for some, as the reviews almost invariably include some deprecating comments about Grant's "Scotticisms." The generally admiring reviewer for The British Critic, for example, follows his rather bizarre admission that he was "startled" by the use of the Scottish pronunciation of a Scottish name (Graham) in a poem by a Scot by helpfully informing Grant that treating the name as a monosyllable "will be seen as a blunder" by "every reader on this side of the Tweed."[19] No less captiously, The Monthly Review criticizes the name of the Gaelic heroine of The Highlanders, thinking it self-evident that "gentle poesy should be allowed to euphonize such an unplastic name as Moraig."[20] Such minutely detailed criticism indicates the narrowness of late Augustan poetic taste and the pressures that Grant had to resist in order to maintain any sort of individualized Scottish voice. What matters, apparently, is pleasing an English ear rather than conveying the voice of another culture, and what reviewers seemed to want was the foreign made comfortably familiar. Given such anxieties on the part of the British critical establishment, the familiar heroic couplets and the decorously conventional poetic devices with which Grant sprinkles her descriptive passages might have been necessary to make palatable even the dash of Scottish language that she employs.

Twenty-first century readers, however, might find the eighteenth-century idioms that seemed to reassure the original readers sufficiently foreign to contemporary tastes to drown out, on first reading at least, anything peculiarly Scottish. Indeed, the language that Grant uses might at times sound so abstract or merely conventional to a post-Romantic audience as to make it difficult to distinguish between her Highlands and any other landscape. Her description of Autumn, for example, could have appeared in the work of any moderately successful eighteenth-century poet working anywhere in England:

Now Autumn lifts her head, with plenty crown'd,
The breezes wave her yellow locks around,
The purest azure decks her sky serene,
And mild Dejection marks her pensive mien:
Now lonely Meditation walks abroad,
Through all his bounteous works to trace her God:
Now Labour plies his task, with smiling cheer,
To reap the produce of the ripen'd year....[21]

This is, obviously enough, the Highlands as seen from the perspective of an observer well versed in the idiom and values of the eighteenth-century poetic canon, and, as such, made entirely familiar to eighteenth-century audiences. (It is a measure of Grant's success in employing that idiom that the aesthetically and politically conservative Anti-Jacobin quotes this passage as an example of her considerable descriptive powers.) Where Grant differs from predecessors such as Gray, Goldsmith, or Thomson is not so much in her language or imagery as it is in her care to remind her readers of the gap between their own ways of representing the world and that of the people whom she is writing about.

This gap becomes apparent in a number of ways, the most obvious of which is Grant's refusing, at times, to describe things directly and choosing instead to tell her readers how a Highlander would see them. For example, the narrator informs us that a beautiful Highland girl would be seen by a local poet as having hair like "the soft harp's many-sounding strings"; a "modest bosom" as white as "[t]he downy cannach of the wat'ry moors"; and a cheek like "[t]he tufted berries rich in crimson glow" of the mountain ash.[22] What Grant offers here is a sort of translation: conventional Gaelic imagery is transposed into the rhythms and style of eighteenth-century English verse. The exotic, foreign qualities of this poetry are emphasized not only by Grant's care in establishing that such metaphors are not the narrator's but also by the detailed footnotes explaining them. The Highlanders' poetry cannot, it appears, be contained entirely within the polite metrical regularity of the heroic couplet but rather spills over into lengthy prose explanations. These explanations are also noteworthy in their own right. Grant at some points, conventionally enough, implies a more or less generic "otherness" in Highland poetry by comparing it with other "exotic" writing fashionable at the time, particularly the translations from Oriental languages so much in vogue in the 1790s. When at other times, however, she insists upon the rootedness of Gaelic imagery in the poets' landscape, her argument becomes somewhat more complicated, as she implicitly suggests the inadequacies of translation. We can see the appropriateness of the metaphorical link between a girl's skin and a type of plant native to the Scottish mountains only by comparing that plant to something else with which we are familiar. As the metaphorical chains lengthen, what is lost is precisely the immediacy that Grant claims is the great strength and charm of Gaelic poetry.

Grant does, of course, suggest that there are some direct correspondences between Highland culture and that of the wider British society for which she is writing. The village poet she imagines is capable of "[d]escription, such as Thomson's self might own"; likewise, a young satirist "smiles and wounds by turns, / With all the poignant humour of a Burns."[23] Yet even as she makes the comparison, she emphasizes the difference between the anonymous poets that she is describing and the canonical figures she names. Burns and Thomson, though Scots, are very much part of the dominant British canon, while the Highland poets are not: their equivalent gifts do not enable them to reach beyond their enclosed society. This is not, however, a case of their being the sort of thwarted poets imagined by Gray, prevented by poverty and isolation from developing their talents. These village poets might not have the widespread fame and influence of a Milton, but they are, according to Grant, vital to the life of their community and thus neither mute nor inglorious in their own world. What these correspondences imply, in other words, is not merely that these poets are as good as Burns or Thomson but also that their effect in their culture is similar -- a somewhat different matter, as in the latter case the poets are not, like Gray's rural Miltons, dying silent and unfulfilled. Instead, they are participating in the formation of a culture that Grant insists is as stimulating and lively as that of the wider British world, differing only in being much smaller in scale.

Self-sufficient as it is, Highland society cannot however remain immune to the larger world around it. In the last sections of the poem, Grant turns away from village life to explore what was - and perhaps still is - the most famous and far-reaching collision between Highland and British culture: Culloden and its aftermath.[24] In focusing on this story, Grant was, on one level, making an obvious and even sentimental claim for sympathy for the Highland culture she was describing, as "Bonnie Prince Charlie" and his escape helped start the romanticisation of the Highlanders almost at the very moment that their society was being most determinedly crushed. The story of a poor and desperate people protecting the man who had brought their troubles upon them, disdaining the huge price on his head, fascinated eighteenth-century observers well beyond Scotland. Diderot, for one, used it to "prove" man's natural goodness, and supposedly even the Hanovers were so moved by it that they promptly became sentimental Jacobites:

When the Princess of Wales ... mentioned, with some appearance of censure, the conduct of Lady Margaret Mac Donald of Sleat, who harboured and concealed the Prince when, in the extremity of peril, he threw himself on her protection - "And would not you, madam," answered Prince Frederick [the Duke of Cumberland's brother], "have done the same, in the like circumstances? -- I hope -- I am sure you would."[25]

Generally, this appeal to sentiment through the retelling of what was by then a much-loved story served Grant well. This part of the poem seemed to attract reviewers by what they saw as the fascinatingly "authentic" details Grant provided of the prince's escape, making 1746 both an obvious and effective point at which to conclude the poem. There were drawbacks to this focus on Culloden, however, and not just those indicated by the rather amusing alarm of the Eclectic's reviewer, who, in a distinctly minority viewpoint, thought that any whiff of Jacobitism worth reprobating as late as 1808.

An important point that Grant is making through this attention to Culloden is that the apparently timeless Highland culture she has been describing up until then is in fact very much tied to a specific time and place. Of course, hints of the ways in which the Highlands are being changed by the outside world do appear earlier in the poem. An aged widow mourns her son "stretch'd on Hindostan's plain"; more interestingly, Grant imagines a Highlander returning from a day in the mountains to recount a "vision wild of mournful solitude, / That brings the long-lost brother back again / From Quebec's gates, or sad Culloden's plain."[26] The conjunction is significant: the catastrophic defeat that precipitated the destruction of traditional Highland culture and one of the high water marks of British colonial success in North America are equated, as the narrator makes no distinction between the soldiers who died in civil war and those who died upholding empire. Even more significantly, both losses are framed within the folk beliefs of a culture that is supposedly being destroyed no less by the move towards a unified British world, in which English and Scots fight side by side overseas, than by their defeat at Culloden. What Grant imagines in these few lines is a world in which, at least for the thirteen years between Culloden and the Plains of Abraham, traditional folkways hold firm despite all external pressures.

Yet by the fourth and fifth books, Grant shows that culture eroded by the punitive measures taken after Culloden and by the forces driving large numbers into emigration. The traditional community that, in Book 2, was able to sustain itself even in the years after 1746 is by Books 4 and 5, rapidly disintegrating. The poem moves from a celebration of a remote but vibrant culture to a lament for an irretrievably lost world; as it does so, it implicates the wider British world which the speaker is addressing in that loss. Grant ends on a note of urgent warning: however foreign and unfamiliar, the Highlanders offer Britain a solid foundation for the virtues needed to sustain an empire. In a way, this claim again links the poem back to an earlier tradition. Grant's attack on the luxurious tastes sapping all Britons but Highlanders, and therefore threatening imperial power, is anticipated in such popular eighteenth-century poems as The Task. Likewise, in "The Deserted Village," Goldsmith had warned that the loss of England's "honest peasantry" was one that could never "be supplied" -- almost precisely Grant's message. Unlike Goldsmith, however, Grant is not calling on her readers to recognize the importance of the traditions and rural folkways of the society in which they live, but rather is asking them to accept the importance of sustaining a foreign culture within their borders. If not multi-cultural in the twenty-first century sense, Grant's poem nonetheless makes claims for the importance of "otherness" rather than appealing to a shared but vanishing past, as does the poetry of so many of her contemporaries and predecessors.

Yet if Grant regretted the loss of the simple virtues she saw as embodied in Highland society, and ended The Highlanders on an elegiac note reminiscent of "The Deserted Village" or some of the gloomier reflections on cultural decay in The Task, she was not entirely pessimistic about the direction that British culture was taking. The Highlanders, the most ambitious work from the early part of Grant's career, is balanced by Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen, another long political poem, but one that offers at least some glimmers of hope despite its generally sombre tone. It was the last of Grant's major publications and was generally well received, despite some hesitation in The Eclectic about the quality of the poetry. Perhaps because Grant was by that time rather more inclined to celebrate British culture, this poem's politics seemed not to evoke even the mild reservations with which the earlier and ardently anti-Jacobite reviewer of The Eclectic, refighting a sixty-year-old victory, had greeted The Highlanders. Nor, more tellingly, did it provoke anything like the vituperative scorn accorded Anna Laetitia Barbauld's recent and similarly named Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. Grant, who was well-read in, if frequently disapproving of, the work of contemporary women poets, would almost certainly have read Barbauld's poem and no doubt gave hers the title she did to emphasize the ways in which she is offering a rejoinder to Barbauld's gloomy vision of the inevitable collapse of the British empire. It might in part be Grant's celebratory tone that led to the difference in reception (suggesting that contemporary reviewers were hostile not so much to political poetry per se by women, but rather to women's poetry that voiced unpopular or minority political views). Where Barbauld, anticipating Macaulay's image of a Maori tourist sketching the ruins of London, imagines Americans making cultural pilgrimages to see the relics of the dead English civilization that inspired their own, Grant imagines a morally reinvigorated British empire leading the world into the nineteenth century following the collapse of Napoleonic power. She takes care, however, to emphasize that she is talking about British rather than English triumphalism: Scottish and Irish writers (Baillie, Campbell, Scott, and Edgeworth) are all contributors to the resurgent British culture that will lead the nation to new heights of morality and glory.

It is easy, in retrospect, to see Barbauld as offering an insightful critique of empire while Grant basks in complacency. Yet given the similarities between the fears of excessive luxury underpinning Barbauld's poem and those in Grant's Highlanders, published less than a decade before, one should be cautious about drawing too sharp a division between the two writers. The optimism of Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen is by no means complacent or untroubled; indeed, it is hard to see how a poem that begins with an account of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow could avoid a certain sombreness of tone. Grant's letters make it clear that, as vehemently anti-Napoleonic as she was, she was not inclined to celebrate, unproblematically, the dramatic and tragic reverses that followed the attempt to conquer Russia. In a March 1813 letter to Joan Glassell, a young woman whose education she supervised, Grant writes:

You may remember how my imagination was fill'd last winter with the tremendous splendour of the burning of Moscow. This is now succeded [sic] by the horrid grandeur of that funeral pile on where fifteen thousand of the victims of ambition are to be consum'd together affording an aweful lesson to future ages. Time in all his progress has not witness'd such an impressive consummation of calamity, but of the reflections which the present state of the world suggests there is no end. We sit like astonish'd spectators at the winding up of some great Tragedy....[27]

The poem, apparently one of the results of having her imagination "fill'd" by the dramatic events unfolding on the continent, elaborates upon the grave warning in Grant's letter. Her poem is as much an exhortation as a celebration -- the British must be properly chastened by the recent past if the glorious vision of the future that she presents is to be fulfilled. Despite the laments for the loss of the Highland culture with which she opened her publishing career, by 1814 Grant was able, like a number of her contemporaries, to see that loss as a step in the movement towards a stronger, more unified Britain. Even so, she insists that that movement is painful, costly, and fraught with difficulty. As a result, while Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen moves beyond the gloomy reflections that end The Highlanders, it is by no means complacent and in no respect less challenging in its politic vision.

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However ambitious Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen and The Highlanders, these were not the works for which Grant became known. Indeed, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen faded from view so quickly that only two years after its publication, The Monthly Review could comment, in some surprise, on the lack of any poems dealing with the retreat from Moscow.[28] While Grant was soon recognized as something of an authority on Highland subjects, it was her prose, rather than her poetry, that gained her that recognition.[29] Yet some of her poetry did achieve relatively lasting success -- ultimately, perhaps, more lasting than the essays that the Eclectic thought would secure her fame, as for many years Grant was known, if at all, mainly as the author of one set of words for "The Bluebell of Scotland." Although Poems on Various Subjects / The Highlanders and Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen are the only volumes of poetry Grant published, she wrote many individual lyrics for George Thomson, and she quickly established a reputation not just as an essayist but also as a writer of Scottish song, a genre that, in the wake of Burns, had a high level of cultural prestige.

It was also a genre to which women were seen as being particularly inclined and particularly well suited. As Henry Gray Graham remarked, with seeming approval, in his massive history of eighteenth-century Scottish literature, "[w]hen Englishwomen were writing dramas and histories and treatises, their Scottish sisters were quietly writing songs."[30] Women's touch was, a number of commentators agreed, badly needed given the embarrassingly uncensored state of traditional Scottish lyrics up to the middle of the eighteenth century. According to one of her early biographers, Lady Nairne took up her career in song after being shocked at the improper language in a chapbook circulating among villagers. Similarly, Lady Anne Lindsay reported to Sir Walter Scott that she had been moved to write "Auld Robin Gray" because she loved a particular traditional melody but was embarrassed by the "improper words" set to it. Hence she sat down to "give to its plaintive tones some little history of virtuous distress in humble life."[31] With their genteel, feminine touch, in other words, writers such as Lady Nairne and Lady Anne Lindsay were seen as rescuing Scotland's musical heritage for an age in which a true lady would blush at being suspected of any familiarity with some of the racier old songs.

Anne Grant made an important contribution to the canon of songs written in accordance with this newly refined taste. Yet it seems that her attitude to the songs she wrote was more pragmatic than that of many of her contemporaries. She expressed little of the missionary zeal of Lady Nairne, perhaps in part because she wrote almost entirely for profit and on commission. Her process of writing these songs suggests that Grant in fact put them in a slightly different category from her other poetry. Believing as she did that the value of her poems lay in their artless revelation of powerful emotion, her willingness to let Thomson dictate subject and metre and then reshape and edit the songs indicates a degree of detachment from them, however much she teased Thomson about and (on occasion) protested against his demands. Grant's accounts of her more usual process of composition are indeed quasi-Wordsworthian in their insistence upon the importance of emotion (although Grant readily admitted -- and regretted -- that she lacked a habit of intensely concentrated thought, something that Wordsworth of course saw as being no less important to poetry). As she explained to Thomson, when he first commissioned songs from her, it was new to her to be "writing anything not produced by some internal impulse, some Occurrence or Sentiment by which my Mind was agitated or my Heart affected."[32] She was not at all certain, either, that the conscious attention to technique that he demanded would add anything worthwhile to the poems. "You are not aware what you ask, when you desire me to attend to the first & second of every line being peculiarly adjusted as I go along," she wrote Thomson in late 1803; doing so would merely impede the "careless ease" of her verse.[33] More than two years later, she was still sending playful protests along with her songs:

Was ever task Master so hard as you to enjoin me to ravel out the thread of my goodly madrigal & twine it up in a different way, little do the sons of Harmony know what it costs the "Daughters of Music" to twist the neck of a favourite image that had flutter'd about thro the imagination like a pet linnet, or disarrange cherish'd rhymes that sprung up in goodly order like a row of gaudy crocus's [sic] under a citizen's window. All this & more will I do for you, but for you only.[34]

The end result of his intense concern with technical matters, as she demurely informed Thomson, was that she was even more careless about them when composing her songs. Sending one off in 1809, she breezily observed that "it is quite needless for me to be at pains to improve & retouch this, for you and I are like two little fanciful girls dressing a doll. I well know however well I dress my doll that you will redress it a little."[35]

Grant's images -- dolls, birds, flowers -- suggest a fundamentally different attitude towards these songs than towards what she saw as the stern, unornamented truths she sought to convey in her longer, more ambitious political poems. That might have been true of some of the songs but by no means all. Particularly when the songs in question were translations from the Gaelic, she was inclined to take them very seriously indeed and even, despite her teasing protests to Thomson, to consider matters of form and technique in a way that is foreign to her practice not only in the other songs but even, apparently, in the long political poetry. If The Highlanders represents an attempt at translating the concerns of one culture into the idiom of another, some of her songs are much more literal translations, in which Grant demonstrates her acute awareness of the problems of conveying the sound as well as the sense of foreign-language poetry in English versification. Her attentiveness to these issues is most clearly illustrated in a letter published in the second volume of Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, in which she provides a literal translation of the poem "Macgregor na Ruara," followed by a prose commentary on individual lines, which is followed in turn by an abbreviated metrical version. The difference between the two versions can be striking. For example, what Grant translates literally as "My sadness, great sadness, / Deep sadness, lies on me. / I am oppressed by sadness deep and dark / Which I shall never conquer," becomes in the metrical version "My sorrow, deep sorrow, incessant returning / Time still, as he flies, adds increase to my mourning."[36] The bouncily rhymed anapests of the metrical version, inappropriate as they might sound to our ears, were a deliberate choice through which Grant sought to translate the emotional impact of the poem as well as its literal sense.

A devoted admirer of James Macpherson, Anne Grant knew perfectly well that non-metrical translations could be as effective and compelling as anything in traditional English metre. The problem, as she made clear, was that the exotic qualities of Macpherson's language - exotic at least to an eighteenth-century English reader -- give poetry in that style a very different emotional impact than the Gaelic poems she was translating would have had on their original audience. As she writes,

I have endeavoured to transfuse some of the poetical spirit of the original into the metrical translation. To that, the epithet of fidelity may be more properly be applied, because the perusal of it will leave an impression on the English reader, more resembling that produced on the imagination of a highlander by the original, than can possible be done by a literal translation. The last, however, conveys with more distinction and accuracy those facts and images which elucidate ancient manners.[37]

Either version loses something, but Grant is prepared to sacrifice a certain degree of "distinction and accuracy" in order to convey the immediate emotional effect of the poem, an effect that is altered or lost if the style of the poem emphasises the distance of its world from that of its English readership. Of course, the cheery metrical regularity of Grant's translation is almost as foreign an idiom to us today as Macpherson's prose poems were to his original readers, so the effectiveness of Grant's metrical choice is lost. Nonetheless, we should recognize the seriousness of purpose behind this choice, especially given Grant's flippancy about technical matters of metrics elsewhere. Her interest in making the Highlanders accessible to a wider audience involves more than simply retelling Highland stories or describing a remote culture: she wants to convey foreignness of that society even while demonstrating that its literature has an aesthetic power equivalent to and as sophisticated as that of English poetry. Neither version of the translation of "Macgregor na Ruara" can do that on its own, so Grant gives her reader both. Coming from a woman who insisted that her main gifts were lyrical - she felt, then wrote - this refusal to rely on a single lyric voice when writing about what she felt she knew best, Highland culture, is a striking indication of the technical and intellectual complexity of at least some of her songs.

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Anne Grant never set out to earn a living by writing, and she launched her poetic career only when it became the most obvious way for her to supplement her precariously tiny income. While she had indulged in dreams of pursuing her literary interests long before publishing anything, as she rather wistfully confessed to friends, her reservations about publishing were probably sincere. She was prepared to admit serious limitations in her poetic abilities, and given that she reiterated those limitations over a number of years, there is every reason to accept her word when she protested that she was not indulging in false modesty in her self-evaluation - especially as she was no less ready to evaluate her own strengths. Even if her career originated in a need to raise money, however, she had a firm sense of the literary value of what she was doing and, indeed, saw her initial financial success as arising directly from her literary abilities. In an 1811 letter to her son Duncan, then in India, she explained that she was not going to rush into print with work that did not meet her own high standards simply in order to make money, because doing so would be counterproductive. As she observes,

As long as I keep up a certain dignity in my writings and do not descend to tales & novels which if not very excellent are mere catchpenny works, the multiplied editions of my writings are more profitable to my family than new works of a lower character which might sink the reputation of the former.[38]

The seriousness with which Grant took her own writing is obvious from such comments, and throughout her career, she wrote not just for money or for pleasure but also because she believed she had something important to say about Highland life. As she explained to her friend George Chalmers when she decided, in the 1820s, to enter an essay in a competition sponsored by the Highland Society, she was confident that she had "ideas and information on the subject, which scarce any other person who should undertake the task can supply."[39] (She might have been right; she won the gold medal.) In the decades following her 1773 move to the Highlands, Grant wrote because she was a woman of literary tastes who found verse a natural mode of expression, and in that respect she might seem typical of the genteel "lady" poet of the day. Her ambition and her success once she started publishing are very untypical, however, and in her efforts to represent Highland culture in a manner that is simultaneously evocative of that culture and accessible to a large audience, we can see why contemporaries such as Christian Johnstone thought her such a central figure in Romantic era Scottish literature.

Notes

1. [Christian Johnstone], The Saxon and the Gael; or the Northern Metropolis. 4 vols. Edinburgh and London, 1814, 2: 177.

2. These poems were transcribed in or after 1809 by a mutual friend, Margaret Loudon, in a commonplace book now owned by the National Library of Scotland (ms. 23336). Jeffrey's holograph copies of the poems are in a notebook of manuscript poetry compiled by Anne Grant and owned by The University of Edinburgh Library (La. III. 797). While it seems probable that Jeffrey and Mary Grant met at some point during their residence in Glasgow, the poems themselves indicate only that Jeffrey had been shown copies of some of her verse. They were certainly acquainted not long afterwards, as Mary Grant was a friend of Jeffrey's first wife.

3. For Grant's response to Macintosh's praise of Mary's abilities, see Letters from the Mountains, 3 vols, 1807, 3: 17, where Grant writes, "I am not sure whether I should not be sorry to discover those tendencies to genius that some imagine to exist. Distinguished abilities are attended, especially in the undistinguished sex with much risk and much envy." I have used the 1807 edition of Letters from the Mountains as my base text, as Grant made substantial revisions to the first edition of 1806, but I have quoted at times from the 1806 edition, where material I cite is omitted from later versions, as well as from an 1845 edition in two volumes, edited by Grant's son, that includes some letters not in the versions published during Grant's lifetime.

4. I have been unable to trace this writer, although she might have been the Miss J.C. whom Grant criticises in a letter to her daughter Mary printed in the 1845 edition of Letters from the Mountains (2: 126).

5. Letters from the Mountains, 1806, 2: 106. This is one of the letters edited out of the second and subsequent editions of the book. Grant's odd reference to "Ben" Collins might be a slip of the pen, an error on the part of the transcriber or typesetter (for "Wm"?), or simply a lapse of memory.

6. See Anne Grant, Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, 2 vols, 1811, 2: 264.

7. The University of Edinburgh, La. II. 357, f. 43 v.

8. This letter appears in the second edition of Letters from the Mountain, but Grant has edited out this passage, which appears only in 1806 (where it is undated), 2: 98.

9. The University of Edinburgh, La. II. 357, f. 45v

10. The British Critic, vol. 22 (Sept. 1803), 292; The Anti-Jacobin Review, vol. 16 (Oct. 1803), 115.

11. National Library of Scotland, ms. 5598, f. 15. The letter is dated 28 January 1802.

12. John Jackson, The History of the Scottish Stage. 1793. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996, 372.

13. Boswell mentions this incident, which occurred in 1763, in his London journal.

14. Grant analysed her early responses to the Highlands in at least two long letters, one to George Thomson, later published in Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders and one to Catherine Fanshawe, published in Memoir and Correspondence.

15. For James Grant's comments on his mother's forbears, see the 1845 edition of Letters from the Mountains, 1: 46-47, 49, notes; on Lady Nairne, see George Henderson, Lady Nairne and her Songs, Paisley and London, 1905, 15.

16. This letter is printed in Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders 2: 297. It also appears in the 1845 edition of Letters from the Mountains, in which the names are written out in full as Miss Williams and Miss Seward. The change in title and initial in the case of Williams could be a printer's error, or it could have been Grant's attempt to avoid any identification of the author she was criticizing.

17. Superstitions of the Highlanders 2: 270. Passionate about Milton as she was, it is quite possible that "fit audience, though few" is the model that Grant had in mind.

18. Superstitions of the Highlanders 2: 271-72.

19. The British Critic, vol. 22 (Sept. 1803), 240.

20. The Monthly Review, vol. 44 (July 1804), 274. Grant had in fact made clear in her notes that despite the unfamiliarity of the name, she had chosen "Moraig" deliberately and thoughtfully. As she explains, the name "is the Chloe or Phillis of the Gaelic Poets, when they conceal the true name of their mistress" (Highlanders 4: 330, note).

21. The Highlanders, in Anne Grant, Poems on Various Occasions (Edinburgh, 1803), 3: 139-46.

22. The Highlanders, 2: 272-86.

23. The Highlanders, 2: 246, 2: 252.

24. It is not, of course, strictly accurate to say that the conflict was between the Highlands and the rest of Britain (for one thing, lowland Scots fought on both sides), but that is how Grant tends to present it in this poem.

25. This anecdote appears in an article in The Quarterly Review written by Sir Walter Scott (vol. 14 [Jan. 1816], 330). Diderot's comments about the Highlanders appear in his correspondence (Paris, 1957, III. 228) and are quoted by Frank McLynn in Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts (London: Routledge, 1988), 290.

26. The Highlanders, 2: 301, 2: 168-70.

27. National Library of Scotland, Acc. 8508, folder 38. Joan Glassell, later Lady John Campbell, was the sister-in-law and correspondent of another Scottish poet, Lady Charlotte (Campbell) Bury.

28. The Monthly Review, vol. 79 (April 1816), 433. This comment appears in a review of a poem on the subject, which is, incidentally, by another woman, a Mrs. Henry Rolls.

29. The Eclectic Review, in particular, repeatedly called on Grant to focus on prose. When she reissued her slightly edited volume of poetry in 1808, the review singled out the one prose work it contained, an essay on Ossian, for particular praise, commenting that it "is on her composition in this form [prose] that she must depend, as she justly may, for popularity and enduring fame" (4 [Nov. 1808], 1036). Later, in its lukewarm review of Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen, the same journal wondered rather wistfully whether there were no more topics for Grant to explore in letters and essays.

30. Henry Gray Graham, Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1901), 354.

31. See Life and Songs of the Baroness Nairne, ed. Charles Rogers (Edinburgh, 1905), 32-33, and The Lays of the Lindsays, ed. Sir Walter Scott, (Edinburgh, 1824; privately printed), 4.

32. University of Edinburgh Library, La. II.357, f. 43.

33. University of Edinburgh Library, La. II.357, f. 100v.

34. University of Edinburgh Library, La. II.357, f. 128v.

35. University of Edinburgh Library, La. II.357, f. 168.

36. Superstitions, 2: 196, 222.

37. Superstitions, 2: 195.

38. University of Edinburgh Library, La. II.357, f. 208v. A heavily edited version of this letter appears in Memoir and Correspondence (letter 147 in the 1844 edition and letter 110 in the 1845 edition), but this passage has been cut.

39. University of Edinburgh Library, La. II.357, f.223. 22