Abstract
In August 1811, as she was on the verge of publishing her Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, the Scottish writer Anne Grant (1755–1838) received an uncompromisingly critical letter about the collection from her friend and sometime editor, George Thomson, whom she had asked to read the proofs.1 It was her fourth book—or her fifth if one counts a slightly revised edition of her 1803 Poems on Various Subjects—so she was an experienced author, something that must have made Thomson’s hostility to the project a particularly disappointing surprise. Although he had admired Letters from the Mountains, her 1806 quasi-autobiographical account of the Highland culture in which she had spent much of her adult life, Thomson thought the new work entirely unsuited to her abilities. “I cannot help regretting extremely,” Thomson wrote,
that you ever forsook that form of writing, so well suited to display your powers, and to hide your defects. In epistolary writing you maybe as excursive, and miscellaneous, as digressive as you please: -but in Essays of great length, the Public expect a more methodical arrangement, and clearer connection than is suited to your poetical genius and irregular habits of writing. (Thomson f.201v)2
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Notes
Anne Grant, Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland. 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811). The Essays will hereafter be cited in text by volume and page number.
Anne Grant, Letters from the Mountains, 2nd ed., 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1807), vol. 2, 265–6. This reference is to a letter dated July 1793, in which Grant tells a friend the story of her dairy-maid, who believes unquestioningly in a tale of a talking cow. While sharing her friend’s presumed amusement at the maid’s naïveté, Grant insists that such “credulity” is preferable to world-weary skepticism. The Letters will hereafter be cited in text by volume and page number.
Jane Adeane, ed., The Early Married Life of Maria Josepha Lady Stanley (London: Longman & Co., 1899), 290. The letter quoted is dated April 1807.
Francis Jeffrey, “Review of Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders,” The Edinburgh Review 18. xxxvi (August 1811): 481.
John Brewer discusses the manipulation of “the public and private valences of letter writing” in eighteenth-century Britain (12). See “This, That, and the Other: Public, Social, and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformations of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), 1–21. See also Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) on women and late-eighteenth century epistolarity.
See Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) for an informative general survey of the mode.
Ina Ferris, “Translation from the Borders: Encounter and Recalcitrance in Waverley and Clan- Albin,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1997): 203.
For an overview of this theory of history, see Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
Murray Pittock, “Historiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 258–79
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), especially 181–8.
See, for example, Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 4 vols. (1774. London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell; and Edinburgh: William Creech, 1788), vol. 1, 378.
Richard C. Sha, “Expanding the Limits of Feminine Writing: The Prose Sketches of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Helen Maria Williams,” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 194–206.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 25–35. These are concepts that are used throughout the book but are first presented in detail in the pages cited here.
Grant gives no indication here of whom—if anybody—she has in mind, but the most prominent Highlander among the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers was Adam Ferguson, author of An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Grant seems indebted to Ferguson’s arguments on “The History of Rude Nations,” although he focuses here on the ancient Celts and the modern North Americans for his examples.
In addition to the very obvious case of Scott’s Waverley (1814), a major cultural phenomenon, see Christian Johnstone’s Clan-Albin (1815), which features a satiric account of a preening, self-absorbed landowner who adopts Highland fashion in England purely for effect, and Mary Brunton’s Discipline (1815).
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.
James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 33. The phrase quoted is one that Buzard cites from Mary Kingsley in a note (also on 33), and his focus in the passage is on Malinowski and the complexities built into the Participant/Observer figure in anthropology in one of the foundational texts of the discipline.
Andrews Norton, “Review of Memoir and Letters,” North American Review 60 (1845): 148.
See Johnstone, The Saxon and the Gael, 4 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg; and Edinburgh: T. Dick, 1814), vol. 4, 62. Grant revealed in a letter she wrote late in life to Walter Scott that she was a believer in second sight. Her deep concern that Scott not reveal the fact until after her death indicates her desire to maintain intellectual credibility as an observer rather than an exemplar of Highland culture. The undated letter was probably written around 1828, and is owned by the National Library of Scotland (Ms. 3907, ff.350–52).
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© 2011 Judy A. Hayden
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Perkins, P. (2011). Grant: Gender, Genre, and Cultural Analysis. In: Hayden, J.A. (eds) The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118430_14
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