Catholic Authors: Anna Elizabeth Buchanan (1836-?)

ANNA ELIZABETH BUCHANAN is known as a writer of magazine articles and short stories of very considerable merit. She was born in British North America of pious Episcopalian parents, and her life was passed in England and Scotland under Protestant supervision. Her marriage in Scotland to a Buchanan of Glenny was but short-lived; she early became a widow with one son. In 1878, then a staunch member of the English Church Union and of the “Order of Reparation to the Blessed Sacrament” in that church, she surprised and angered her relatives and friends by renouncing that faith. The shock of the death of her beloved brother, the Rev. Edwin Roper Martin, that indefatigable priest of Lewnham Paddox and Lutterworth), caused the conversion which he had so ardently longed. The Faith was “her brother’s legacy,” as Lady Georgiana Fullerton beautifully expressed it. He who had been cut off his earthly inheritance when he became a Catholic left his sister an inheritance which she says she has found to be of such amazing worth that no amount of earthly wealth can approach it. With Lady Denieh as her godmother, she was received at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in 1879, and after a visit to Rome she returned with the Holy Father’s blessing and was confirmed in Cardinal Manning’s chapel.

Anna E. Buchanan’s greatest grief now was her son’s separation from her. He wandered about as a sheep without a shepherd for eighteen long months (a time never to be forgotten, she says, by either of them), and when he was about to return to Oxford, to graduate, to the great joy of his mother he embraced the faith and knelt by her side on his nineteenth birthday in St. Augustine’s Church, Tunbridge Wells, at Mass for the first time.

On the south side of the city of Glasgow, Scotland, is the Episcopal church, St. Ninian’s. This mission was started in Buchanan Court through the instrumentality of Anna E. Buchanan, and it has been an invaluable aid to that side of the city. The same zeal was not wanting as a convert; but now loss of means pressed heavily upon a delicate frame, and also interfered with her plans for her son’s future welfare. Still, in Kent there stands a monument of the grace that brought her into the fold, for no sooner had she adopted the faith than she was called to found a mission where in vain two previous bishops of Southwark had attempted it, and to whoever should succeed in founding it each one left his dying blessing.

A voyage to this country being the only alternative when dispossessed of their means, Anna Elizabeth Buchanan and her son came to the new world in 1887 ; hence the opportunity we have had of placing her name upon the roll of Catholic women writers of America.

The Catholic World, Vol. LXV (April 1897): 133-134.