'Defiance' book review: why Lady Anne Barnard was so important in SA's history

Stephen Taylor has written a remarkable biography of a remarkable woman who was way ahead of her time

The name of Lady Anne Barnard is better known in South Africa than in England or Scotland, but even here we don't actually know that much about her, other than that she made a name in the early colonial days of the Cape, and has rooms named after her in the Castle of Good Hope. And, of course, that she allegedly swam naked in a rock pool on the slopes of Table Mountain.

South African-born Stephen Taylor has produced a highly readable and informed biography of her, because he is the first biographer to be given access to her memoirs held in her ancestral home of Balcarres in Scotland, and because he is a great storyteller.

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His book The Caliban Shore told the story of the survivors of the wreck of the Grosvenor in 1782, just 15 years before Barnard came to the Cape.

Born the daughter of an elderly Scottish earl in 1750, Lady Anne Lindsay first made her mark in Edinburgh society where she mixed with figures of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Sir Walter Scott and philosopher David Hume, and with Samuel Johnson when he visited Scotland.

In London, she again mixed in high society with the intellectuals, the rich and powerful of the day, including the Prince of Wales, later George IV. She was also a friend of his mistress Mary Fitzherbert, and took her on a protracted holiday to Europe to escape the royal obsession. But Fitzherbert later buckled and secretly married him.

Lady Anne had an endless list of admirers, suitors and benefactors who bankrolled her lifestyle, which was both lavish and modest in that she made her own unfashionable clothes.

With some justification she developed the reputation of being a flirt who led men on and then dumped them. The details of all her rejected marriage proposals (more than 20) become tedious reading.

Eventually at almost 42 she married "beneath her", to army captain Andrew Barnard. Marrying a much younger man - he was 30 - for love, defied convention and was something of a scandal in itself.

She relentlessly used her influence with powerful men to get him a job as secretary to the first British governor of the Cape Colony, George Macartney. Unlike most wives of British officials abroad, she chose to go with him, and her years at the Cape, from 1797 to 1802, were the happiest of her life.

Within weeks she had climbed Table Mountain, and she remained always curious about and interested in Africa, unlike many of her compatriots who hated it and looked down on the Dutch farmers.

Barnard invited them to meals. In the absence of a governor's wife she hosted lavish parties at the castle, and she and Barnard lived in two modest homes, the second of which was the Vineyard, where the present hotel stands.

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She and Barnard undertook a month-long trek into the Boland as far as Swellendam and the Breede River mouth, where she explored the fate of the survivors of the Grosvenor.

They then went north to Saldanha Bay, with Anne ever eager to meet the Khoi and the "real natives", the Xhosa. She never did meet the latter, but made beautiful sketches of the former.

Her diaries and letters are an important insight into South Africa's history, and are key to this book. Maybe too much so, for in many instances we, like the author, have to take her at her (edited) word.

She spent years in her old age editing them for her family, and they were transcribed by Christina, the illegitimate daughter who her husband fathered by a Khoi woman in the Cape. When Anne heard of this after his death, she had the girl sent to England in 1809 and raised her as a daughter.

She forbade the publication of her memoirs. They never have been.

This is an absorbing account of a woman way ahead of her time, who contributed positively to our history.

• Our reviewer gave Stephen Taylor's 'Defiance: The Life and Choices of Lady Anne Barnard'  (Faber & Faber, R420) a rating of  4/5 stars.