Memoirs of an American Lady.
Grant, Anne [Macvicar]. Memoirs of an American Lady. With sketches of manners and scenery in America, as they existed previous to the Revolution. In two volumes. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme,… and Mrs. H. Cook, 1808.
2 vols., 12mo.; bookplate on front pastedowns; three-quarter calf, marbled boards; lightly rubbed; extremities worn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this early history of the development of the Dutch settlement in Albany, and a memoir of the woman who helped to establish it; with two pages of ads in the rear.
Best-known as the Scottish-American writer who, with her pastoral ballad The Highlanders, vividly and permanently altered public perception of Highland culture, Anne Macvicar Grant (1755-1838) was shaped by her experiences on the American frontier in New York state with the Albany Dutch, where she and her mother were the first upper-class women to penetrate “the then trackless wilderness.” Grant was also heavily influenced by Madame “Aunt” Margaretta Schuyler (1701-1782), a popular and prominent member of the community who opened her home to host forums on religion and morality, assisted new settlers, and set up an informal academy in which to educate girls with “useful knowledge” instead of with feminine frivolity. In later years she was seen as a “public oracle … resorted to and consulted by all.” Grant described her as “the most distinguished woman in the province of New York, perhaps on the American continent,” and “a most valued friend.”
In this memoir of her experiences Grant pictures an idyllic society of “equality, simplicity, and moderation” created by European aristocrats. One scholar writes,
She depicted independent patroons who wisely ruled a culture in which public service was instinctual, Europeans lived in harmony with Indians who acknowledged white superiority, and in which slaves were few, well-treated, and happy in their servitude. In this edenic setting children communed in summer picnics and winter sledding. Their rites of passage involved perilous adventures, while Arcadian forests stirred dreams of social bliss and the thunderous thawing of the Hudson occasioned a “perfect saturnalia.” The analogy between the Highlands and Albany, though unspoken, is palpable. (Gallagher)
Grant’s work is important not just as biography and history—Conway calls it “an invaluable account of domestic life and manners in Colonial New York…”—but as feminism as well (Blain writes that her “conservatism and self-deprecation have somewhat obscured her quiet feminism and remarkable mind”). Grant herself acknowledges in her dedicatory preface the tension and play among these genres:
I may venture to invite you … to trace this feeble delineation of an excellent, though unembellished character; and of the rapid pace with which an infant society has urged on its progress from virtuous simplicity, to the dangerous ‘knowledge of good and evil:’ from tremulous imbecility to self-sufficient independence.
She follows this with accounts of the development and daily life of the settlement; of religion, manners, education (“instruction of children devolved on females”); of marriages, entertainment, and domestic economy; of the social status of slaves and Indians. She places special emphasis on the Schuyler clan; and on the development of the military and their growing relation to the populace before, during, and after war. Grant also touches upon her own experiences in and around Albany, as one of the earliest patrician women on the New York frontier.
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After returning to Scotland, Grant wrote occasional verse and many, many letters; Sir Walter Scott called her “the maintainer of an unmerciful correspondence.” Initially she made no attempt to publish, devoting her time to her husband and twelve children. After becoming a widow in 1801, though, financial necessity forced her hand, and she began to compose and compile for publication:
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