Inscribed work by a female poet

 Grant, Anne (Mrs Grant, Laggan) THE HIGHLANDERS AND OTHER POEMS [Inscribed by the author]  

London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808

2nd Edition, 12mo (17cm), xii, 298pp (2) glossary, half calf, purple cloth over boards, top edge red, fore and bottom edge untrimmed.  marbled endpapers.  Inscribed by the author to the title page:  ‘To Miss Anne Rose from the author’  Some wear to leather,  but binding very secure.  Endpapers intact.  Some foxing to prelims and sporadically throughout. Generally very clean.

Mrs Anne Grant of Laggan (1755–1838) was a Scottish poet and author best known for her collection of mainly biographical poems,  ‘Letters from the Mountains’ and ‘Memoirs of an American Lady’.  She was born in Glasgow to Highland parents.  The family spent some time in North America before returning to Scotland in 1768, where they settled in Fort Augustus and then Laggan (Badenoch, Speyside).  She first published her poetry in 1803 by which time she had left Laggan with her family and reluctantly returned to the lowlands, where she became a highly popular author.   Inscribed copies of her work are very rare.  The ‘Miss Anne Rose’ of the inscription may have been a daughter of Elizabeth Rose, Lady of Kilravock, a literary critic and author whom Mrs Grant refers to, in very obliging terms, in her ‘Letters to the Mountains’. (4th Edition, 1809, Vol III, p. 183).  There was an ‘Anne Rose’ at Kilravock in the latter half of the 18th Century, so the name was certainly in that family.

       

[ref:1447]£400