Grierson (Crawley), Constantia (c.1705–1732), editor, scholar, and one of Swift's female literary circle, was born Constantia Crawley in Graiguenamanagh, Co. Kilkenny, into a poor family. Little is known of her early life or education, save from the memoirs of her friend Laetitia Pilkington (qv), who states that she moved to Dublin aged about eighteen, and was there introduced to Laetitia's father, the well-known Dublin obstetrician Dr Van Lewen. Under him she was to train in midwifery, though according to Laetitia (Pilkington, i, 17), she ‘was already mistress of Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French; understood mathematics as well as most Men’. She was apparently tutored by her local minister. Her scholarly attainments were the more surprising given that her parents were poor and uneducated country folk, though her father had encouraged her learning. As she took her meals with the Van Lewens, she was constantly in Laetitia's company and the two women formed a close and lasting friendship. Laetitia remembers that ‘she wrote elegantly both in Verse and Prose; and some of the most delightful hours I ever past, were in the Conversation of this female Philosopher’ (ibid., 18). As her piety was equivalent to her learning, the family were not to guess that she would arrange meetings in her lodgings between their daughter Laetitia and her future husband, Matthew Pilkington (qv).
It is not known if Constantia ever practised midwifery, but despite her humble origins she quickly established a reputation for her intellectual abilities as a poet and scholarly editor. By 1724 she was editing Virgil's Opera for her future husband, the Scottish-born George Grierson (qv), a bookseller and later king's printer based in Essex Street (latterly Capel Street), Dublin. The exact date of their marriage was not recorded as she was already expecting his child, but it can only have taken place after April 1726 when his first wife died. A son, George Primrose, was baptised in July 1727 at St John's church, Drumcondra (where Grierson lived), but died owing to the nurse's negligence. A second son, George Abraham, was born in 1728 and was their only surviving child; the deaths of two daughters were recorded in 1731 and 1733.
As Grierson's ‘corrector of the press’, she prepared editions of his famous pocket classics, most notably Terence's Comediae (1727) and the works of Tacitus (1730), which secured her reputation. The former included a written dedication by her in Latin to the infant son of Lord Lieutenant Carteret (qv), and the Tacitus included one to Carteret himself. She contributed in many ways to the success of Grierson's business, as was clearly shown in 1730 when they jointly petitioned the Irish house of commons to obtain the patent of king's printer. In 1732 Grierson was granted the office in reversion following the passing of Andrew Crooke (qv), the previous patentee. Constantia can be regarded unofficially as the first Irish woman king's printer, and the petition certainly pointed to her proofreading skills and contribution to the art of printing, which ‘through her Care and Assistance, has been brought to greater Perfection than has been hitherto in this Kingdom’ (Pollard, Dictionary, 253–4).
Poetry was her other passion, and even under her maiden name, Crawley, she appears to have been deemed a formidable female rival, being lampooned in a 1729 reprint of the Dublin scuffle or hungry poet's petition: ‘These female wits are dang'rous cattle, they are a kind of snakes, that rattle’ (p. 17). As the printer, E. Waters, was located near Essex bridge, very close to the Griersons’ business, it is likely that he knew her personally. To Laetitia Pilkington she was ‘the learned Nymph whom curiosity engaged every person to see’, and so she endeavoured to show Patrick Delany (qv) Pilkington's own ‘scribbles’ (Pilkington, i, 24).
Having defended Delany against the mockery of Jonathan Swift (qv), in ‘The goddess Envy to Dr D—l—y’ (published anonymously in 1730), she was introduced to the dean and would become the youngest of his celebrated ‘Triumfeminate’ of Dublin wits, with Mary Barber (qv) and Mrs E. Sican. Swift regarded them as ‘the only women of taste here’, and found Grierson a very good classics scholar, praising her Tacitus as ‘a fine edition’, and welcoming her editorial skills alongside those of Mrs Barber (Swift, Correspondence, iii, 464, 412). She was also part of Delany's senatus consultum at Delville to correct (for publication) the poems of Mary Barber, who had praised her skills in divinity, philosophy and history. Another poem, ‘The art of printing’, distributed by John Barber as a single broadsheet in 1732, has also been attributed to her.
As a poet she wrote on love, friendship, faith and motherhood, but was, according to friends, extremely modest about her compositions and made few efforts to preserve them. However, six of her poems are included in Barber's Poems on several occasions (1734), and a further three in Pilkington's Memoirs (1748). A manuscript of her work, discovered in the 1980s, includes nine completed poems and several unfinished works. Her son George Abraham Grierson (qv) (1728–55) would become a king's printer and a friend of Samuel Johnson; he died in Düsseldorf. She died 2 December 1732, probably of tuberculosis, and was buried in St John's churchyard, Drumcondra.