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.
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...
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
politics
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
At the meeting the female members of the first Married Women's Property Committee
confirmed the text of BLSB
's parliamentary petition and planned for a signature crusade and then for the presentation of the petition...
Herstein, Sheila R. A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Yale University Press.
58, 71
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...
Textual Features
Isabella Bird
This early travel narrative is immature in comparison with IB
's later writing. It repeats accepted stereotypes about Americans through the voice of a tentative female traveller who, in turn, conforms to the stereotype of...