Louise's Reviews > Defiance: The Life and Choices of Lady Anne Barnard

Lady Anne Barnard was born of Scottish nobility just as the country was integrating into Great Britain. Through her life you see how the Empire’s opportunities and demands played out in people’s lives. Anne’s brothers were able to have careers in the church, the navy and India and Lady Anne’s mother networked in London to find suitors for her daughters. Lady Anne’s most famous creation is a song about the pressures of marrying to save a family from poverty.

While a minor noble without a budget for a wardrobe, Lady Anne still had a title which helped her make made her way in the top echelons of Georgian society. Her wit and confidence in conversation (a primary asset in drawing rooms) may have come from knowing (through her father) the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. She was musical and beautiful.

You read of Lady’s Anne’s bachelor days where she has many admirers and travels on her own. I lost count of the marriage proposals; some came from top politicians. She also had a wealthy admirer who set her up in style. There are not many happy marriages in her environment. The saddest, up close, is her sister Margaret’s.

Lady Anne’s hasty courtship and marriage shocked society. Anne has to ask her old politically powerful beaus to find him a position. His lack of a title sticks in their craw. (She has married beneath us!) The result is several years in South Africa where Anne recorded botany, brought back unusual animals, created paintings and wrote of the land and the experience; all an important documentation of the time. Anne clearly shows her metal after her husband's death as she nurtures his natural children.

Besides its portrait of Georgian society, there were, for me, a few other insights. I came to understand the background of the rumors surrounding the Duke of Wales’s, (George IV’s) (perhaps) first wife. She was a friend of Anne’s; the two single women traveled extensively together at a time when this was just not done. Also new to me was how British aristocrats enjoyed trips to France to, essentially, watch the revolution… almost like we watch documentary films. While not new, the description of the different administrations in the Cape showed the pettiness of colonial administrators.

The research and presentation are good. The reader comes to understand this eccentric person, but his book is not for everyone. You need to have interest in this period or this person to make it work for you.