Memoirs of a Highland Lady Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  Preface

  Chapter I.1797–1803

  Chapter II.1803–04

  Chapter III.1804–06

  Chapter IV. 1806–07

  Chapter V. 1807–09

  Chapter VI. 1809

  Chapter VII. 1809–10

  Chapter VIII. 1810–11

  Chapter IX. 1811–12

  Chapter X. 1812

  Chapter XI. 1570-1813

  Chapter XII. 1812–13

  Chapter XIII. 1813

  Chapter XIV. 1813

  Chapter XV. 1813–14

  Chapter XVI. 1814

  VOLUME TWO

  Chapter XVII. 1814–15

  Chapter XVIII. 1815–16

  Chapter XIX. 1816–17

  Chapter XX. 1817–18

  Chapter XXI. 1818–19

  Chapter XXII. 1819

  Chapter XXIII. 1819–20

  Chapter XXIV. 1820–23

  Chapter XXV. 1823–27

  Chapter XXVI. 1827–28

  Chapter XXVII. 1828–29

  Chapter XXVIII. 1829

  Chapter XXIX. 1829–30

  Index

  Introduction

  Memoirs of a Highland Lady has long been recognised as a classic of Scottish nineteenth-century literature. Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus wrote it between 1845 and 1854, in the middle of a long life that began in 1797 and ended nearly ninety years later. It was originally intended as a private memoir for her family alone. The first public edition did not appear until 1898, edited and abridged by her niece, Lady Strachey, who explained in the introduction:

  These memoirs were written by Mrs Smith for her own children and the daughter of her sister, Mrs Gardiner, with no thought but to interest them in those scenes of her early life which she recalled so vividly, and has narrated with such lively simplicity.

  The book’s devoted readers would sing its praises rather higher, for although it was, indeed, hastily written without the use of journal or diary notes it is a masterpiece of historical and personal recall, clearly organised, and so vividly written that the attention of the reader is held to the last page.

  Lady Strachey’s edition was so popular that it was reprinted four times within the year, and a letter in the archives of John Murray, the publisher, testifies to a demand that was still unsatisfied:

  I should be greatly obliged if you could say if there is any likelihood of a new edition of the Memoirs of a Highland Lady being published in the near future. Second-hand copies of this book I am advised are now selling at high prices—a guinea to thirty shillings.

  A second edition appeared in 1911, also edited by Lady Strachey, who took the opportunity to reduce it still further—by almost a third, in fact—as she explained in letter to John Murray … ‘the whole of the journey to Holland is omitted and all of the Indian part, except what was necessary to finish up the fortunes of the family.’ Reprinted in 1928, this was the text which Angus Davidson edited and prepared for the Albemarle Library in 1950.

  The Highland Lady has remained in steady demand over the years, but in fact most of the copies of this acknowledged masterpiece contain no more than two thirds of the 1898 edition which was itself abridged from the original manuscript. The opportunity to publish the first complete and authentic edition of this perennial favourite has come about through the generosity of Mrs Ruth Forster, Elizabeth Grant’s great-great-grand-daughter, to whom has descended the two vellum-bound, manuscript volumes that are undoubtedly the original. These were written in Elizabeth Grant’s meticulous hand-writing, which seems effortlessly to flow over the sheets in her endearingly readable style. It is incredible that she managed to produce such consistency, as for the most part her Memoirs were produced, as she wrote herself, ‘so much by snatches, never getting above a few done at a time since the idle days of Avranches.’ Family tradition has it that they passed to the second daughter, Annie, because she was the favourite, but equally it might have been because she was the mother of most of the Highland Lady’s grandchildren. Alas, the first eight either died young or had no children, so it was, remarkably, through the ninth child, Lizzie, that the manuscript passed to Ruth Forster. Her magnanimous decision to lend them to the National Library of Scotland was the first step towards this new edition in the Canongate Classics series.

  From the very first sentence of the original manuscript it was clear that there were many adjustments to be made. For example, Elizabeth Grant was born at 5 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, and not at number 6, as all the earlier editions maintain. An accurate and complete edition involves a faithful return to the manuscript and therefore to the style and practices of an intelligent and hugely literate writer who had been born in the eighteenth century. Yet some changes, and some footnotes, do need to be introduced for the modern reader. One or two cases of repetition have been removed, abbreviations like Edin. for the city of her birth have been altered, and the manuscript use of & has been changed to and along with the conversion of fs to represent ss. The original chapters have been restored and where it seemed that her paragraphing was more effective, this too has been brought back. Elizabeth Grant’s use of capitals is idiosyncratic. Another obvious change is her use of capitals for emphasis (so that a visit to a Play might appear in the same sentence as the adjective french), and her spelling has been returned to its period style. Sympathetick, puritanick and arithmetick; bachelour, mirrour and errour; cloke, dropt and skreen; cantilevres, burthens and accompt … these and many more give us the authentic voice of the Highland Lady. That voice has its own comment to make for example when she chooses in most cases to refer to her stern mother with a capital M.

  Place names have been presented in their most immediately recognisable modern spelling. This was especially necessary for the many Gaelic place names around Rothiemurchus, for it is clear from these and other words that Elizabeth Grant’s Gaelic was phonetic, suggesting that she had a reasonable comprehension of the language as it was spoken by most of Speyside at that time. The dance Shean Trews she writes as Chantreuse place names like Drumochter, the Lairig Ghru and Carrour she writes as Dromouchta, Laigrew and Carower. Her Father is recorded as Ian Peck rather than Beag (little), and briach (pretty) is written ‘breach, breach (pronounced pree-ack)’. Slough Mouich, which she gives as ‘the pass of the wild boars’ is an accurate translation where Lady Strachey’s Slochd More is obviously wrong.

  Stylistic matters apart, there are a number of substantial benefits in a return to the full text. In the first place a much fuller, sharper and less ambiguous portrait is drawn of the Grant family. For the early reviewers in 1898, Elizabeth Grant’s mother was ‘unsympathetic, indolent and autocratic withall’ (The Times) and Blackwood’s Magazine concluded she was ‘one of those unfortunate people in whom physical suffering has produced some curious twist of the moral nature.’ The more complete portrait shows her mother to be even less likeable, and in some respects ill-tempered and even cruel to her children. That this was an opinion she kept to the end of her mother’s life is shown by the comment in her Journal for 26 September 1842:

  I had almost forgot there were evil passions in human nature, I have lived so long where none are either felt or met with and it jars against my temper to find suspicion, envy, spite, idle curiousity and unkind constructions all in full vigour, in an old woman, too, within a footstep of the tomb. Much, much mischief has she wrought during her life….

  Blackwood’s Magazine saw Sir John Peter Grant as ‘one of those brilliant men who are not born to succeed.’ The Times described him as ‘sympathetic enough, but wayward, extravagant and, though not without shining parts, impracticable and unsuccessful in life.’ His daughter adored h
im but she was not blind to his failings: her account of church collections, inter-family loans and legacies, not to mention the smuggling of china from Holland, show him to have been unreliable and evasive, with his financial affairs in such constant disrepair that he would resort to almost any means to improve them. Furthermore her younger brother, William, the future Laird, was clearly suspected of having mishandled some of the funds gathered for the family’s flight to India, so that it comes as no surprise to learn that his future mother-in-law, the famous actress Mrs. Siddons, should have imposed such a heavy-handed wedding settlement.

  With the restoration of such a family portrait, warts and all, there is a clear gain in historical value, and in readability, too. Elizabeth Grant’s comments on society are shown to be equally trenchant, once the editorial discretion of the earlier versions is discarded. Her sympathetic comments on what she called the madness of George 111, the full description of the deranged behaviour of the writer Basil Hall and Archdeacon Hawtayne, and the oddities of Lady Colville, the wife of the Governor of Mauritius, all help to produce a more interesting and complete picture. Not surprisingly, in the light of her time and station, Lady Strachey invariably pruned all references to sexual misdemeanours.

  This removed the stories about Lord Archibald Hamilton; General Wynward’s ‘undisguised devotion’ to General Anstruther’s wife; Lady Wiseman, who sought ‘safety in numbers’ while her husband was at sea, and the Queen of Sweden’s unseemly pursuit of her former lover, the Due de Richelieu … ‘we set the whole affair down to foreign manners.’ All of these undoubtedly enliven the text. Perhaps the greatest loss was the full story of that engaging femme fatale ‘Mrs X’, now revealed as the wife of Colonel Henry Churchill, whose escapades so enlivened the voyage home from India.

  Readers of previous editions will be able to discover further insights or points of detail to give new interest and impact to the familiar narrative. Thus the Highland Lady’s scathing comments on Sir Walter Scott and his family (more than a matter of their different political and social backgrounds), adds an unexpected dimension to our understanding of Scott’s contemporary reputation. Shelley’s undergraduate shortcomings at her uncle’s Oxford college; Sir Edward Barnes’ misgovernment of Ceylon; and the unfailingly critical mentions of Eton, to which her brothers were sent, these and many other examples provide additional and welcome insights into a fascinating period.

  The Times’ first review saw Elizabeth Grant as ‘simple, sincere, kindly and unaffected’ and described her as an ‘engaging chronicler of the ways, manners and experiences of her youth.’ The unexpurgated edition demonstrates that there was a steelier and racier side to her reminiscences, less in tune with the moral complacencies and certainties at the end of the century. This is confirmed by the realistic and honestly matter-of-fact accounts, of servant immoralities at Rothiemurchus and the resulting regular pregnancies. The long saga of Peggy Davidson, and the apparent suicide of her former lover Simon Ross, is a good case in point. An otherwise puzzling mention of a pension awarded to a former servant, Mrs Sophy Williams is now revealed as reparation by her employer for the careless accident that left her with a wooden leg. Elizabeth Grant never shirked her own responsibilities, not least to the truth.

  The first volume of this edition tells of the Highland Lady’s childhood and adolescence in Rothiemurchus, Edinburgh and London, set against the efforts of her father, Sir John Peter Grant, to improve his family fortunes. He himself was somewhat uneasily placed between the role of a traditional highland chief and that of a substantial landowner with ambitions to be an advocate in Edinburgh and an M.P. at Westminster. As the original Scotsman review commented, ‘The portraits of the numberless host of family connections and retainers are drawn with spirit and humour,’ and Elizabeth Grant’s reputation as a fascinating and reliable chronicler of the first quarter of the century is enhanced by this expanded account of her own family’s trials and tribulations. The volume ends as the decision is taken to move to Edinburgh, a city then in the last glow of the Scottish Enlightenment. There she met and came to know many of the movement’s leading figures, especially those whose Whig political sympathies were shared by her father. It was hoped that the change to Edinburgh would bring prosperity to the father and enhance the marriage prospects of the daughter.

  The second volume begins in 1814, when the author was seventeen, and it shows that these new hopes did not last. Elizabeth suffered a broken engagement and her own unhappiness only echoed the difficulty encountered by her father as he pursued his legal and political ambitions. The summer of 1819 was spent in a family tour of Holland, after which the decision was taken to return to Rothiemurchus as Sir John Grant retreated from political aspiration in the face of his financial problems and a life increasingly dominated by pressing creditors. The Grant sisters played their part by writing articles and stories for the popular magazines of the day. Elizabeth was proud to record what the owner and publisher of Fraser’s Magazine said about her first attempts: ‘the very best things of the kind I ever read … if these are the first productions of a Writer, what must her future efforts produce?’ Rescue for the Grants was to come in the somewhat unexpected form of a Bombay judgeship, which Elizabeth believed to be a reward for certain favours her father managed for George iv on the occasion of his celebrated visit to Scotland in 1822. The Memoirs end with an Indian section during which the thirty-three years old Elizabeth Grant finds the chance of future happiness in marriage to an Irish landowner, Colonel Henry Smith, then in the East lndia Company Cavalry. After all the problems of youth and maidenhood, it looked at last as if the Highland Lady’s future was secure, ‘an end indeed to Eliza Grant.’

  These recollections have had a devoted following amongst all sections of the reading public for nearly ninety years. Their publication now, in a form faithful to the original intentions of the writer, means that a full text is available for the first time outside the immediate family. Elizabeth Grant’s witty eye never fails to animate the manners, fashions and events of her day; more than that, her manuscript is an inexhaustible document of social and historical value. Memoirs of a Highland Lady has confirmed its reputation as a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Scottish writing.

  Andrew Tod

  Author’s Note

  The decision to publish a fourth impression of the Memoirs gives me the opportunity to add a few words to earlier introductions, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of what I called “the first complete and authentic edition” of one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century Scottish literature. This has been in print most of the years since Lady Strachey’s edition of 1898, and is still appreciated by scholars and the less academic reading public, which recognises and values Elizabeth Grant’s well-written recollections of her life and times.

  A great deal of recent literary and historical exploration has helped to paint a fuller background to the family and social context within which she wrote. This has provided material both for academic articles and writings of more general interest. Thanks to the generosity of the present generation of Grants at Rothiemurchus, and the riches of the archives in the British Library and the National Library of Scotland, there is a great deal of evidence to justify a biography of the Highland Lady, and this is indeed in the course of preparation. It will make use, for example, of hitherto unknown letters and the many articles she wrote for popular journals of the day.

  I have been blessed in my researches by too many well-wishers and institutions to mention here, but I would like to repeat my gratitude to the ever-supportive great-great-grand-daughters of the great lady, Ruth Forster and Patricia Pelly.

  Andrew Tod, 2012

  Preface

  After breakfast and my little walk I write the recollections of my life, which I began to do on my birthday to please the girls, who eagerly listen to the story of their mother’s youth, now as a pleasing tale, by and bye it will be out of a wish to feel acquainted with people and places I shall not be at hand to introduce them to.
This effort of memory amuses me extremely. I live again my early years, among those who made the first impressions on my mind, many of them gone where I am perhaps slowly but very surely following, and I recall places very dear to my imagination, which were I now to see I should probably, from the changes made in them, know no more. I am glad I thought of this way of occupying my quiet day, a part of it at least, the hour or two thus employed steals easily away. The pleasure of talking over these bygone times with my children attaches us the more to one another. As we become more confidential in our intercourse, we make the tale profitable too by the comments we engraft upon it, and best of all it encreases my content with the present, the contrast between my maiden days and married life being to all rational feelings so much in favour of the latter.

  from the Irish Journals of the Highland Lady 8 June 1845

  VOLUME I

  MEMOIRS OF MY LIFE

  BEGUN TO PLEASE MY CHILDREN

  AND MY NIECE

  AVRANCHES

  MAY 18451

  1. The families of Elizabeth and Mary Grant

  spent 1843-1845 in Pau and Avranches.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1797–1803

  I WAS born on the 7th of May 1797 of a Sunday evening at No. 5 N. side of Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, in my father’s own lately built house and I am the eldest of the 5 children he and my Mother reared to maturity.

  My parents had married young. My father wanted a few weeks of 22 and my Mother a very few of 21 when they went together for better for worse, my poor Mother! They were married on the 2nd of August 1796 in the church of the little village of Houghton le Spring in the County of Durham. I have no genealogical tree of either family at hand, so not liking to trust to memory in particulars of this nature, I must be content with stating that my father was descended not very remotely from the Chief of the Clan Grant and that these cadets of that great House having been provided for handsomely in the way of property and having also been generally men of abilities in their rude times, had connected themselves well in marriage, and held rather a high position among the lesser Barons of their wild country.