Anne Home Hunter (1741–1821) was one of the most successful song writers of the second half of the eighteenth century. She usually wrote words for existing tunes, but she also set verses written by others to her own music, and sometimes composed both words and music. Although her lyrics were widely published and republished in dozens of contemporary and early nineteenth-century anthologies, her musical settings fared less well and many were replaced by those of other composers. Almost all her published songs were anonymous, including those used by Haydn in his two sets of Original Canzonettas, even though he dedicated the first set to her. So while they were known to family and friends, they never made her famous. Anne was also a more serious poet, writing many rather gloomy poems. Some exist only in manuscript but many were published, along with the words of yet more songs, in her collected Poems, which appeared in 1802 under her own name, or rather under the name by which she was most known, Mrs John Hunter. During her long widowhood she wrote a libretto for Haydn's Creationand many verses for George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Welsh Airs. Some rather sombre poems appeared in later anthologies and others written in her old age survive only in manuscript.

Although the outline of Anne's life is well known, having been the subject of several essays and biographical introductions in anthologies, details have had to be culled from diverse sources, both published and unpublished. Often highly personal, her own poems signal her interests and concerns and much can be learnt from the numerous biographies of her famous anatomist husband John Hunter. The well-known Hunter- Baillie collections in the Wellcome Library and the Royal College of Surgeons of England have been frequently consulted, along with the Hunter Family Album, some of the papers of William Clift, and the Sherborne Collection also held in the Royal College of Surgeons. However the most important and previously untapped primary sources are the papers relating to her brother Robert Home in the British Library, the letters of Isabella Elliot in the National Library of Scotland, the published letters of Joanna Baillie and William Clift, and especially the letter that Anne wrote in 1766 to her great friend, Alice Shippen, that is preserved in the Library of Congress.