Mrs. Grant "of Laggan," to distinguish her from several other Mrs. Grants of her time, lived in several distinct worlds. She spent her childhood on the frontier of America, half her adult life on the northern frontier of Scotland, and the other half in Edinburgh, one of the great centers of Western culture. She was an isolated and imaginative girl, a dutiful minister's wife, a mother of twelve, and then a literary lioness. In America she received the stamp of a prerevolutionary multicultural society, the Albany Dutch, and of a traditional Dutch American woman, Margaretta Schuyler, both of which Grant vividly depicted in a little-known work of American history, Memoirs of an American Lady (1808). She then took her "American" values to the Highlands of Scotland, where she became the first effective apologist for the ancient pastoral society of that region at a time when it was coming under...