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.
Harriet Siddons was the widow of Sarah Siddons
's youngest son, the actor-manager Henry
. While in Edinburgh, FK
met Anna Jameson
and engaged in frivolous courtships.
Marshall, Dorothy. Fanny Kemble. Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
28, 42
Clinton, Catherine. Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars. Simon and Schuster.
33
Friends, Associates
Jessie Boucherett
Partly through her membership of the Kensington Society
(a social and political discussion group of about fifty women inaugurated in 1865), JB
broadened her acquaintance with significant members of the feminist movement, including Frances Power Cobbe
Friends, Associates
Jessie White Mario
JWM
employed Anna Jameson
's niece and biographer Gerardine Bate Macpherson
as her personal secretary. Gerardine lived in with the Marios for a year, until she died in 1878 (in Jessie's arms).
Daniels, Elizabeth Adams. Jessie White Mario: Risorgimento Revolutionary. Ohio University Press.
179
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Gaskell
EG
was glad to escape the storm of controversy that her novel had raised in Manchester, and to be feted in London. She already knew Mary Howitt and Geraldine Jewsbury
(who lived in Manchester). Although...
Friends, Associates
Harriet Martineau
HM
's social circle vastly expanded at this time until she knew virtually all the prominent people, particularly the political men, of her day. As she recorded in her Autobiography, however, she refused to...
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
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
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.
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, pp. 12-35.
19
Corinne was enormously influential for nineteenth-century women writers. The model...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Power Cobbe
FPC
's early reading reflected an interest in women and women's contributions to the world of letters. She read and copied out for herself passages from Anna Jameson
's Commonplace Book.
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press.
77
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...
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
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.
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.
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
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Jameson, Anna Brownell. Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad. Saunders and Otley, 1834.
Jameson, Anna Brownell. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. Saunders and Otley, 1838.