‘It's the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time.’ Elizabeth Grant (1797-1885) was not a bad girl, though a wilful one; but it seems that she had not the time to keep a diary regularly until 1845 when she was a good middle-aged lady. For she says that when compiling her Memoirs of a Highland Lady she had ‘no memoranda of any sort to guide me’ (M, I, p. 234). If, as there is no reason to doubt, this is true, she had an extraordinary capacity for visual recall - of large numbers of persons, their characters, appearance, clothes, and of scenes, especially interiors. She is, however, no Boswell; she remembers, or cares to tell, comparatively little of what people said, even when in her Irish journal she is writing about current happenings. In general she is more concerned with what can be seen than with the inner life. ‘These Memoirs are but the fair outside, after all, a deal is hid, both as regards myself and others, that it would be painful to record and worse than useless to remember’ (M, II, p. 245). Fortunately she sometimes transcends this limitation.

Though having no memoranda for the Memoirs she does tell of having written, at about the age of seventeen, a journal of daily doings great and small to send to an aunt in England to show the happiness of life in the Highlands. When her father read it he was so bewildered, ‘unused to that poetick or portraitick style of writing, it was not known at that period, that he judged the wisest thing to be done with so imaginative a brain was to square it a bit by rule and compass’. He began to teach her mathematics, ‘an entrancing study’, in order to ‘strengthen the understanding sufficiently to give it power over the fancy’ (M, I, p. 331). The flights of fancy in these adolescent writings were chastened, but the imaginative brain lived on, complementing memory. Like all the best autobiographies the Memoirs at their best are imaginative recreations of the past, not just feats of memory.