ABSTRACT
Anne Grant's response to the Highland landscape and to the Highland people was coloured not only by her own identity as a Lowland-born Scot of Highland parentage but. perhaps even more significantly, by her early experience of another culture and people as a young adolescent in the British colonies in Albany, New York. This chapter identifies three primary ways in which colonialist writers define and document the alien: by screening the incomprehensible out of the picture altogether, by naming and foregrounding the strangeness, and therefore acknowledging it, or by subverting terms of cultural familiarization so as to debase or ridicule, thereby reinforcing rather than obliterating difference. Despite living for many years among them, Grant's picture of the Highland peasantry and landscape remained a deeply idealized one. In 1811 she published Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, her most formal attempt to represent Highland culture to the outside world.
