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

The inhabitants of New York State in the troubled period between the Seven Years' War and the outbreak of open hostilities with Britain might have been surprised to hear that they were living in an earthly paradise. Yet a pre-adolescent Scottish girl who spent much of the 1760s following her father from one military post to another found Albany and the surrounding wilderness closer to an ideal world than anything she was to encounter at any other time in her life. At least, that was the way that she presented it some 40 years later, when, as an established author back in Britain, she wrote a memoir about her childhood experiences, lamenting the lost idyll of pre-Revolutionary America. While not well-known today, the writer in question, 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 girlhood. Her Memoirs of an American Lady, ostensibly a biography of Catalina (or Margarita) Schuyler, a member of a distinguished Albany family, strays far beyond its rather obscure subject and turns into a wide-ranging account of pre Revolutionary life, incorporating personal memoir and both cultural and political history into its loose biographical narrative. Given this ambitious combination of subjects, it is somewhat surprising that where the Memoirs has attracted attention in American literary studies, it has done so as more or less straightforward history, mined for anecdotes about quaint colonial practices. Treating it in this way also requires highly selective reading, as Grant's vision of colonial life incorporates a deep awareness of the limitations of pastoralism as an ideological construct. Far from being a rosily warm evocation of a lost, simpler past, the American Lady belongs in a tradition of post-Revolutionary writing that explores the virtues and limitations of the new American society through a representation of a vanished or forfeited idyll. In her account of paradises gained and lost, of childlike innocence, both individual and cultural, shattered by greed, war, and racial conflicts, Grant demonstrates the troubled complexity of the late eighteenth-century American pastoral and suggests, as she does so, both the cultural importance of a vision of pastoral innocence and the impossibility of maintaining it.

It is not, of course, all that surprising that Grant, a patriotic Briton, would have found much to mourn when, in the opening years of the nineteenth century, she turned her thoughts back to 1760s America and started to reflect upon what she had lost.¹ Yet the reception of the American Lady might tip us off that the results of those reflections are more complicated than one would expect of a self-proclaimed church-and-king Tory who hated almost everything about the Revolution. Even though Grant and her family—who had intended to settle in America—were ardently Loyalist in their politics, the book outraged at least some of those who might have been expected to share her perspective, and almost immediately upon publication, she found herself threatened with a lawsuit by the widow and daughter of a colonial administrator of whom she had spoken slightingly.² The book was, in fact, more warmly received in the United States, where readers seem to have taken Memoirs of an American Lady as a piece of charming early Americana, something that might account for its otherwise rather odd appeal to them despite its overt hostility to the Revolutionary cause.³ It maintained at least some literary place there long after it had been forgotten in Britain: a Professor Garscombe of New York, who visited Edinburgh in 1819, was pleased to meet Anne Grant at a social gathering, commenting that "she is popular with us, from having given so agreeable an account" of her time in America (The Contrast 197). Some time later, James Fenimore Cooper's daughter included excerpts from the American Lady in an essay on her father's work, using it to provide a period backdrop for Cooper's...