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