[4] Colquhoun was a philanthropist and she founded a small domestic college at her house where young girls could learn about cookery and needlework.

Colquhoun's teaching were valued by the students at the college and this made a change from her experience when she had tried earlier to read the Bible to some of her own staff.

[8] Her religious enthusiasm led her to give up both novels and the theatre in the early nineteenth century and in 1811 she is said to have celebrated her 30th year by saying goodbye to her youth with no regret.

Colquhoun defended the principle of Sola fide, justification by faith, but resisted the idea of antinomianism.

Colquhoun objected to this so strongly that when she later had to make the same trip, she avoided the two-hour train journey and took two days to travel the same distance by horse instead.

[11] It has been proposed that Colquhoun and her husband were the models for the character of Rabina and George Colwan in Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.