Poems on Various Subjects

Additional information

1st ed, VG, 1807. In tan half calf with blue printers boards, gilt tooling, edges & corners bumped & worn very lightly, boards marked. Spine, gilt titles & tooling, some blind tooling, edges bumped slightly. Internally, [4], 5-447 pp, blue endpapers, bookplate to fpd, text block edges speckled blue, page 370 incorrectly numbered 270. Grant, author, who upon the death of her husband in 1801 left her in extreme poverty, alleviated only by a £30 pension to which she was entitled as a chaplain's widow; this meagre income was stretched to support herself and the eight children remaining of her family of twelve. Her answer to her straitened circumstances was to prepare a collection of the verses she had written over the years for her extensive correspondents, and thanks to the efforts of her friends and admirers, including the notorious Jane Gordon, wife of the fourth duke, no fewer than three thousand subscribers were found, and the volume was published in 1803. See ODNB. (The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism By Murray Pittock. The British Critic, Volumes 21-22, p291).