Paradises Lost: Anne Grant and Late Eighteenth-Century Idealizations of America

Writer Anne Macvicar Grant built a reputation for herself in the opening years of the nineteenth century as one of the foremost commentators on Highland Scottish culture. In 1808, however, Grant turned her attention back to the America she had known in her childhood. Her Memoirs of an American Lady, ostensibly a biography of Catalina Schuyler, a member of a distinguished Albany family, strays far beyond its rather obscure subject and turns into a wide-ranging account of Revolutionary life, incorporating personal memoir and both cultural and political history into its loose biographical narrative. Perkins critiques Grant's Memoirs of an American Lady.