Memoirs of an American Lady: With Sketches of Manners and Scenery in America, as They Existed Previous to the Revolution

Before America was America, a young Scottish girl arrived in the New York colonies and found her way into the household of one of Albany's most remarkable women. Decades later, Anne MacVicar Grant sat down to preserve what she remembered: not merely a portrait of her beloved friend, but an entire world that would vanish when the Revolution swept it away. Written with the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that Wordsworth himself celebrated, Grant's memoir captures colonial society at its most vivid, the comfortable homes of the Hudson Valley, the complex relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples, the slow build of tension under British occupation. But above all, it captures a singular friendship between a impressionable young girl and a woman of sharp wit, deep virtue, and keen observation who became her window onto a society on the cusp of transformation. This is history recollected in tranquility, with an artist's eye for detail and an historian's passion for truth.