Elizabeth Grant |
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Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurcus was born in Edinburgh on 7 May 1797. Her father was Sir John Peter Grant, a lawyer and landowner, and in 1802 the family moved to London, with their summers continuing to be spent on the family estate of Rothiemurcus. In 1814 Sir John returned to Edinburgh to practise at the Scottish Bar, but he ran into financial difficulties and the family moved back to Rothiemurcus. Elizabeth's brother William was jailed for debt in Edinburgh in 1826, and in 1827 Sir John escaped his creditors by accepting a judgeship in Bombay, India, taking the family with him. It was in India that Elizabeth met and married Colonel Henry Smith, an Irishman seventeen years her senior. Smith inherited the family estate of Baltiboys, Co. Wicklow, on the death of his elder brother in 1830, enabling him to resign from the East India Company, with whose armed forces he had been serving. Elizabeth bore him at least three children (the first, Janey, was born in 1830), and after a period in France they retired to Baltiboys, where Elizabeth died on 16 November 1885. Her memoirs were published by her neice Lady Strachey in 1898 under the title "Memoirs of a Highland Lady", and it is for this that she is famous. More recently, the journals of her years in France and Ireland have been edited and published.
AC
Memoirs of a Highland Lady (1898)
The Irish Journals of Elizabeth Smith, 1840-1850, ed. D. Thomson, M. McGusty (Clarendon 1980);
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