City Readers Digital Historic Collections at the New York Society Library

Mary Ann Hanway was an eighteenth century travel writer and novelist. She has been proposed as the anonymous author of Journey to the Highlands of Scotland (1777).

Hanway was also the author of Christabelle, the Maid of Rouen (1814), in which a woman's father loses their family's fortune, and she joins a nunnery, Ellinor (1798), and Andrew Stuart (1800). Hanway did not always find the process of writing easy, declaring in the preface to her 1809 novel Falconbridge Abbey, that "four years it has been procrastinated, from a series of ill health, having laid dormant in my desk for six months together!".

Hanway declared in Ellinor that "There are very few arts or sciences that women are not capable of acquiring, were they educated with the same advantages as men".