The History of the Unfortunate Lady Grange: Gothic Exhumations of a Concealed Scottish Fate

Abstract

Forgotten, concealed histories can return with a vengeance to haunt the imagination of a nation. This article explores the seldom-discussed history of the abduction, long-term imprisonment and falsified burial of Lady Grange, who was kidnapped from Edinburgh by allies of her estranged husband, and then slowly transported to St Kilda where she spent the following nine years. It is a tale upon which James Boswell commented when he toured Scotland with Samuel Johnson, and which, in the wake of Boswell's commentary, entered the Gothic imaginary, first through the romances of Ann Radcliffe. Although marital imprisonment was sadly all too widespread during the eighteenth century, with numerous sources to choose from, the history of Lady Grange, blocked for four decades after her death, returned to haunt the pages of romances and periodical articles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After examining what James Boswell wrote about Lady Grange, the article focuses on two romances of Ann Radcliffe, her 1789 The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and her 1790 A Sicilian Romance. The article then looks at William Erskine's 1798 Epistle from Lady Grange and concludes by reflecting upon the unblocking of the story in the nineteenth-century periodical press.