Women's Travel Writings in Scotland: 'Letters from the Mountains' by Anne Grant and 'Letters from the North Highlands' by Elizabeth Isabella Spence

Anne Grant's Letters from the Mountains was one of the most popular accounts of Highland society to appear in the years before Sir Walter Scott's Waverley. Born in Glasgow and raised in America, Grant accompanied her parents to Fort Augustus when she was eighteen and then married the minister of the remote Highland parish of Laggan. She lived there for more than two decades, raising a family, learning Gaelic and observing the rural society around her. She also maintained a voluminous correspondence with her friends elsewhere in Britain, describing what she presented as the exotic and almost entirely unfamiliar world in which she lived. These letters became one of her main resources when she was left a widow with a family of young children to support; collected and published as Letters from the Mountains (appearing first in 1806 and then in a substantially revised version in 1807), they helped both to establish Grant's reputation as a writer and to shape Romantic-era ideas of Highland society.Elizabeth Isabella Spence was one of Grant's readers. From a Scottish family, though raised in England, she wrote two accounts of her travels in Scotland. Letters from the North Highlands, her second, is a lyrical account of Highland landscape, that, in contrast with Grant's long-term engagement with the culture, offers a relatively early version of the Highlands as a site of picturesque tourism. In addition, Spence provides an account of the literary life of Scotland at this time, one that is particularly focused on women: this volume, which is dedicated to Jane Porter, is noteworthy for offering the fullest narrative of the life of the working-class Aberdeen poet Christian Milne (ostensibly in her own words) as well as a glimpse of the elusive novelist and journalist Christian Isobel Johnstone.Together, these volumes offer both a view of Scottish Highland life at a time of major historical transition and an insight into women's contributions to the literary construction of one of the major sites and sources of the Romantic picturesque.