Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anna Brownell Jameson
-
Standard Name: Jameson, Anna Brownell
Birth Name: Anna Brownell Murphy
Nickname: Nina
Married Name: Anna Brownell Jameson
Indexed Name: Anna Brownwell Murphy
ABJ
, a prolific and professional writer of non-fiction, is best remembered for her travel writing, her treatises on art, and her provocative studies of fictional and famous women. In England she is noted for her feminist criticism and biography, and for her support of the younger set of writers and activists who founded the English Woman's Journal. In Canadian literary history she is remembered primarily for her forward-looking, feminist travel narrative Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. Critics are just beginning to take stock of the achievements and influence of one of the foremost women of letters in early Victorian England.
Mermin, Dorothy. Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England 1830-1880. Indiana University Press, 1993.
For nearly six years she was an invalid, though she was able to work very productively for the first few years and remained well enough to receive visitors. She was helped financially by two female...
Friends, Associates
Augusta Ada Byron
AAB
remained close friends with Mary Somerville's family, and particularly with her eldest son by her first marriage, Woronzow Greig
, for the rest of her life. Somerville not only fostered Ada's mathematical aptitude, but...
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett, 1878.
26
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett, 1878.
37
She moved and entertained...
Friends, Associates
Matilda Hays
She remained friends with Anna Jameson
, Isa Craig
, and Emily Faithfull
, but the biographer of the last-named surmises that Hays's loyalty to Faithfull (whose reputation was tarnished because of her involvement in...
Friends, Associates
Mary Russell Mitford
She knew most of the literary women of her day, including Felicia Hemans
(who wrote to ask her for an autograph),
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett, 1882, 2 vols.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 213
Health
Adelaide Procter
AP
's health was poor from an early age. A letter from William Thackeray
describes her at the age of fourteen as vomiting basins of blood. She went to Italy for a year in 1853-54...
Intertextuality and Influence
Germaine de Staël
After completing this novel GS
wrote, I'd like a really big [writing] table, it seems to me I've got the right to it now.
qtd. in
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, 2001, pp. 12-35.
19
Corinne was enormously influential for nineteenth-century women writers. The model...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isabella Bird
She used her royalties to buy boats for impoverished Scottish fishermen.
Kaye, Evelyn. Amazing Traveler, Isabella Bird: The Biography of a Victorian Adventurer. Blue Penguin Publications, 1994.
29-30
There were literary precedents for the kind of book IB
created on her return to England. Frances Trollope
had published in 1832 her...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Eliot
To research her next novel, GE
benefited from further travel in Italy, as well as by a vast course of reading which included Anna Jameson
on monasticism.
Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot: A Biography. Oxford University Press, 1968.
349
Intertextuality and Influence
Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington
This narrative was apparently planned to fit its six illustrations: portraits of imaginary beauties by Edmund Thomas Parris
(whose work featured also in Gems of Beauty).
The novel followed on the heels of Anna Jameson
Intertextuality and Influence
George Eliot
In December 1870 she began writing Miss Brooke, a narrative which became part of Middlemarch as the history of its heroine. Not long after this she thought of combining this story of a daughter...
Intertextuality and Influence
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin
The subtitle of this novel (which in earlier centuries had been the title of a bawdy song) here alludes to a proverb about the impossible perfections of maids' husbands and bachelors' children. This first novel...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
The title of this novel, published in 1836, echoes and responds to Anna Brownell Jameson
's Diary of an Ennuyée, 1826. The hero, Byronic Lord Eustace Hartston, keeps the heroine, Lady Harriet Delaval, some...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dora Greenwell
Throughout the essay DG
relates her arguments to those of John Stuart Mill
, Anna Jameson
, and Bessie Rayner Parkes
, and though she agrees with them on certain points (mainly their call for...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Beecher Stowe
HBS
is remembered above all as having contributed substantially with Uncle Tom's Cabin to the build-up of anti-slavery feeling in the North before the Civil War. The sense of her influence is encapsulated in the...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Jameson, Anna Brownell. Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad. Saunders and Otley, 1834, 4 vols.
Jameson, Anna Brownell. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. Saunders and Otley, 1838, 3 vols.