Echoes of Albany
The Transatlantic Reflections of Anne Grant in Memoirs of an American Lady
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20249161 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R Anderson Sutton (Liverpool John Moores University, corresponding author), Rob Sutton (0009-0000-0770-376X) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 20 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-29 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/h14020020 |
| OpenAlex | W4406958019 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
This essay explores the mid-eighteenth-century travel experience of Scottish writer Anne Macvicar Grant [1775–1838]. Grant is perhaps best known for her late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing and anthropological discourse focussed primarily upon the Scottish Highlands. Yet, the majority of Grant’s childhood was spent in Albany, New York. After she had established herself as a writer and published various texts dealing with her more recent experience in the Scottish Highlands, in 1808, Grant published Memoirs of an American Lady, a semi-biographical account of her childhood spent in the multicultural contact zone of a British military outpost. There are two key issues that this essay explores. First, I discuss the process of memory. Unlike intentional travelogues of the time, Grant’s text was not compiled with the aid of a diary or ledger. Grant’s entire account comprises memories of events that occurred over forty years in the past. Part of this essay then discusses the potential fallibilities of the fragility of human memory upon the traveller. While it may be anticipated that this first issue is detrimental to the account of the traveller, the second key issue that I explore is arguably advantageous to Grant’s account. The extent to which Grant, throughout her life, immersed herself within various marginalised communities undoubtedly allows for the production of a more nuanced and balanced account of external cultures than was the custom at the time. What complicates this account is the mixing of memory and cultural immersion. In her writing around the Scottish Highlands, Grant frequently relies upon her experience of certain cultures as a child to explain and convey her understanding of the different marginalised communities she encounters as an adult. Integral to this essay is the fact that this mixing of memory and cultural exposure also occurs the opposite way around. In the Memoirs, the writer’s recollections of the Mohawk or the Kanien’kehà:ka people and colonial Dutch communities as a child seem to be coloured and subjected by her more recent experience of the Highland people
Art · Art history · Memoir · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |