Travelling hopefully
What is the point of this blog? well it is largely to encourage me to pull together and publish my research into the life of an eighteenth/ nineteenth century woman who was determined to have an impact on the lives of others. She deserves to be remembered. Moreover her life demonstrates both what was possible as modernity advanced, and the leisure reading material available to women in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Widowhood gave Beatrice Grant – born, and always also, according to Scottish custom, Beatrice Campbell – the chance (the freedom…) to go into print. Her aim was less to entertain than to educate, fortunately given her writing style, I feel. Other women felt the same urge but Mrs Grant was unusual in choosing to use all the media available to her – newspapers, London-based magazines, and books – despite spending her life in the small towns (one of them my birthplace) and countryside of highland Scotland. Her father and brothers were soldiers, her weapons were her determination and her pen.
I came across her by chance, in a long-ago advertisement in a local newspaper. I had the opportunity to join a panel at a conference in a place I had never been to but it was clear that I could not squeeze the woman whose life I had been tracking into the parameters of the meeting. So time to step to the side.
It soon became clear to me that Mrs Grant, as she sometimes styled herself (more anon, indeed anon) was a thread worth following – indeed one the fates had intended me to tug at.
First, many years before, I had taken a photo of a memorial plaque to her father and brothers in a remote highland church.
Neil Campbell of Duntroon
Second, I found myself spending time in the small East Lothian town where one of her publishers, and strongest admirers, had lived. All hail! to one of my heroes, George Miller.
Later, there was a further twitch of fate – I ordered a bound volume of a ladies’ magazine of the 1810s and received a copy which I am pretty sure, from the handwritten annotations, was her own.
For those interested, I reported on a brief sighting of Miss Campbell as a blithe bonnie lass on a trip on Loch Ness in an earlier blog https://historysofar.wordpress.com/2017/02/12/another-place-i-have-yet-to-get-to-the-falls-of-foyers/ (Falls of Foyers, 12 February 2017), and in the most ‘recent’ on Ministers’ wives, what did life have in store for her? https://historysofar.wordpress.com/2018/01/29/ministers-wives-a-doitering-rumination/ Bit of a spoiler there.
To be continued….
History so Far 