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.
Closest to CMS
were her siblings and their spouses, several of whom were also published authors. The Sedgwick family and Fanny Kemble
were apparently the inner circle of the literary scene in the Berkshires,...
Herstein, Sheila R. A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Yale University Press, 1985.
58, 71
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
Fanny Kemble
Mary Russell Mitford
was another who knew FK
well even apart from their connection through the theatre.
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: 119-20
Other friends from this period or soon afterwards included the future poet and novelist Caroline Norton
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
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, 2004.
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
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
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
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
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
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...
Timeline
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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.