Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anna Brownell Jameson
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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.
Some reviews applauded the courage of Ruth and its author; others decried the subject-matter and language. Henry Fothergill Chorley
's Athenæum review was mixed: he admired some scenes for their honesty and naturalness, but was...
politics
Emily Faithfull
By 1859 The English Woman's Journal was felt to be no longer adequate on its own for promoting women's work, and Jessie Boucherett
suggested the creation of a society which would deal specifically with this...
Occupation
Sarah Stickney Ellis
SSE
supported her husband's missionary activities, helped edit his writings, and worked with him to promote temperance. She felt uneasy about her role as minister's wife and the invisibility which it brought; when she agreed...
Literary responses
Sarah Stickney Ellis
Mary Ann Evans
, later George Eliot, read SSE
's conduct manuals in the 1840s, but it is unlikely that Eliot took the advice too seriously, since other intellectual women were vocal in their distaste...
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
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...
Textual Features
Caroline Frances Cornwallis
CFC
takes her examples of great works done by women from three books published only the previous year: The Communion of Labour by Anna Jameson
, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses by Frances Margaret Taylor
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
Textual Features
Mary Cowden Clarke
Despite the word girlhood, MCC
meant these tales as adult reading matter. Working in the tradition of Anna Brownell Jameson
's Shakespeare's Heroines (originally published in 1832 as Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and...
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett.
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.
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett.
37
She moved and entertained...
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...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
By 1832 she had read Mme de Staël
's novel of the romantic female artist, Corinne, three times and claimed the immortal book ought to be reread annually.
Browning, Robert, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Brownings’ Correspondence. Editors Kelley, Philip et al., Wedgestone Press.
3: 25
She strongly admired the...
Anthologization
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
For a young woman who had never attended university (as she of course could not at this time) to offer a translation from a classical language was both courageous and confident.
It was a long...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Her response to him made it clear that she wanted a literary friendship and exchange. He resisted her attempts to cast him as her tutor—as well he might, being younger and the less established poet...
