Anna Jameson

Canadian writer

• Born: May 19, 1794
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: March 17, 1860
• Place of death: London, England

Although her work was long neglected after she died, Jameson was one of the major writers of nonfiction prose during the nineteenth century. Her long and varied career encompassed both Europe and Canada, and her travel writing, art criticism, Shakespearean critiques, and social commentaries covered new subjects in sometimes controversial ways.

Early Life

Anna Jameson was born Anna Brownell Murphy, the daughter of Richard Murphy, an Irish painter of miniature portraits. The Murphys were not well off, and when Anna was four they moved across the Irish Sea to England—first to Whitehaven in the English county of Cumbria. When Anna was eight, the family moved again, to Newcastle-on-Tyne, where they eked out a living on her father’s paintings. However, after a few years. Murphy became more successful as a painter, and the family moved to London, where they began to mingle with prominent figures on the city’s cultural scene.

In London, Anna became familiar with the literary world in which she was to spend the rest of her life. In 1820, she became engaged to Robert Jameson, a young lawyer on the fringes of that literary world, However, rather than marrying Jameson immediately, she chose to work as a governess for two families, the Rowles and the Hathertons. She got along well with the latter family, but her years as a governess were not happy ones. However, they provided her with insights into the plight of working-class women that she would later use in her books about social conditions.

Anna traveled with the Rowles to Italy—a trip that yielded literary fruit. In 1826, she published Diary of an Ennuyée . Now regarded as a classic account of a young Englishwoman’s impressions of the Continent, her first book was badly reviewed at the time, both because of perceived infelicities of style and also because it seemed to embarrass the Rowles family. The fact that he book was actually a mixture of fact and fiction—a melding that would later intrigue literary historians—confused contemporary reviewers.

Also during 1825, Anna finally married Jameson. They lived together for four years, but when Jameson was sent to the Caribbean as a colonial official in 1829, Anna instead went to Europe with her father and a family friend. She found her travels in Germany particularly gratifying, as she made the acquaintance of Ottilie von Goethe, the daughter of the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who became a lifelong friend. She also gained an acquaintance with German culture rare for an English person of her generation.

It is unknown why Anna was separated from her husband for such a long time. However, when her husband was appointed a colonial magistrate in Canada, she decided to accompany him to Toronto.

Life’s Work

In 1836, Canada was a country beginning to emerge into democracy and self-government. Robert Jameson’s task was to serve as a constitutional official—speaker of the House of Assembly—without having the consent of the people, which inherently limited his position. Anna Jameson found Toronto drab and provincial, especially in comparison to the American cities that she had visited on her way to Canada. However, she enjoyed visiting the Georgian Bay area and walking around Lake Huron, where, at Sault St. Marie, she met the American ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft, who taught her about the customs of the Chippewa people who inhabited the area.

Jameson’s book about her trip, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), is less about castigating Toronto as dull than it is about Jameson’s ambivalent curiosity about the countryside and the native peoples that would capture the imagination of later generations. Written in diary form, Winter Studies is now seen, despite Jameson’s frequent condescension toward Canada, as an early document of Canadian literature.

Some critics have theorized that the way that the imaginative energies of Jameson’s book gravitate toward the wild is also an allegory of the breakup of Jameson’s marriage. In any event, she and her husband separated for good in 1837. She once again traveled around the Continent, returning to England only after her father died in 1842. From that moment, she lived in the midst of London’s literary world, where she became acquainted with the younger poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and developed a close friendship with Lord Byron’s widow that eventually ended acrimoniously in 1854.

Jameson’s work had three main focuses during the last twenty years of her life. As an art historian, she wrote, in Sacred and Legendary Art (1865) and Legends of the Madonna (1861), primarily about sacred art, especially the representation of the Virgin Mary and of women in general in Christian art of the medieval and Renaissance periods. She wrote about this material in strictly aesthetic terms, rather than promoting religious belief.

As a literary scholar, Jameson wrote, in Shakespeare’s Heroines (1832), about the female characters in William Shakespeare’s plays, in the very period when great women actors—instead of men—were beginning to play those roles in theatrical performances and in the Victorian cultural imagination. As a social commentator and reformer, Jameson wrote in Characteristics of Women (1832) and Sisters of Charity (1855) about the position of women in the social sphere, the ways they were mistreated in private situations, such as those of governesses, and the general waste that society made of women’s talents. Although she did not write at length on the slavery question, she was active, with her friend Harriet Martineau, in the British abolitionist movement, which by that time was concerned only with slavery in the United States, as slavery had already been abolished throughout the British Empire.

Despite Jameson’s status as a single woman, she remained a respectable figure in Victorian literary society. Her former husband never gave her the financial compensation that he had promised her, and her later years were marred by illness and quarrels with former friends. However, when she died in 1869, at the age of sixty-six, tributes were paid to her for her energy and longevity on the literary scene.

Significance

After Anna Jameson died, she and her art books were soon forgotten. John Ruskin began to talk about Renaissance Art in a much more polemical, theoretical, and passionate manner. Jameson’s travel books were also soon forgotten, and her social tracts were left behind as people moved on to new issues and concerns. However, Jameson’s work serves as a bridge in literary history: between the European continent and the Canadian wilderness, between romanticism and Victorianism, and between the history of Western aesthetics and the development of a feminist sensibility.

Like many other nineteenth century women writers, Jameson had to be reclaimed in the late twentieth century from an obscurity that befell her after her death. In her case, she had two critical movements working to reclaim her: not only feminism but Canadian nationalism. Despite Jameson’s brief stay and divided stance toward Canada, it is there that she is most highly regarded and seen as a part of a national literature.

Bibliography

Desmet, Christy. “’Intercepting the Dew-Drop’: Female Readers and Readings in Anna Jameson’s Shakespearean Criticism.” In Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On the Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H. D., George Eliot, and Others, edited by Marianne Novy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Examines the key role of Jameson’s Shakespeare criticism in calling attention to women’s roles in the plays.

Henderson, Jennifer. Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Occasionally dense but informative book examines Jameson’s Canadian writing, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, in the light of conceptions of gender roles and of the relationship of the white settlers to indigenous peoples.

Johnston, Judith. Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1997. The first comprehensive biography of Jameson to take the insights of feminist criticism into account. Johnston is especially insightful on Jameson’s continental and artistic connections. This book is the foundation for the late twentieth century flurry of scholarly work on Jameson.

Lew, Laurie Kane. “Cultural Anxiety in Anna Jameson’s Art Criticism.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36, no. 4 (Autumn, 1996): 829-856. Provides a basic overview of Jameson’s writings on art, centering on their pioneering exploration of women in artistic representation, while also discussing how Jameson admires the great European art of the past while nonetheless being perturbed by it.

Lootens, Tricia. “Fear of Cairina: Anna Jameson, Englishness and the ’Trite Placer’ of Italy.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 39, no. 2 (April, 2003): 178-189. Examines the influence on Jameson of her older contemporary, the French novelist Germaine de Stael, and how Jameson’s portrait of Italy displays typically English anxieties about the delights and temptations of the European continent.

Monkman, Leslie. “Primitivism and a Parasol: Anna Jameson’s Indians.” Essays on Canadian Writing 29 (1984): 85-95. A noted Canadian scholar examines Jameson’s representation of indigenous peoples in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada.

Thomas, Clara. Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. This first twentieth century biography of Jameson helped to put her work back on the literary map.

York, Lorraine M. “’Sublime Desolation’: European Art and Jameson’s Perceptions of Canada.” Mosaic 19, no. 2 (Spring, 1986): 43-56. A beginning effort in an area that may become a major concern of Jameson studies: linking her insights into European art with her exploration of native American experience.