Richard had married his first wife Agatha, only surviving child of the banker David Barclay of Youngsbury, who brought his daughters up in "what may be termed the best aristocratic Quaker life of the middle of the eighteenth century".

[1] Anna's eldest half-sibling was Hudson Gurney, twenty years her senior; as adults, they shared scholarly interests.

It was felt by the Barclay grandparents that Richard was too much a typical country squire and too little a serious religious man, so they asked a sixteen-year-old niece to live with the widower and "instil some sterner Quaker spirit" into the children.

This included abolition work, education for children, geology which mainly focused her geological research on local portions of the Cromer Forest Bed Formation, and purchasing a Manby Mortar, an apparatus used to fire a line to a ship in peril for the town of Sheringham.

In 1819 she brought out anonymously, in a limited impression for private circulation, A Literal Translation of the Saxon Chronicle.

This work, which went to a second edition, was commended by the highly respected academic James Ingram, in his Saxon Chronicle with Translations, 1823, preface, p. 12.

She also owned at least one Old Norse-Icelandic manuscript, an eighteenth-century copy of Víglundar saga, now in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries Special Collections.

After a short illness she died at the residence of her brother, Hudson Gurney, at Keswick, near Norwich, on 6 June 1857, and was buried alongside Sarah-Maria Buxton[6] in Overstrand Church.

[3] Anna's half-brother Hudson Gurney was an MP for much of 1812–1832, active in abolitionism, and, once out of Parliament, was appointed High Sheriff of Norfolk.