Anna Jameson

Anna Brownell Jameson (17 May 1794 – 17 March 1860) was an Irish writer. She wrote early feminist works and travelogues.

Jameson was born in Dublin.

Her father, Denis Brownell Murphy (died 1842), was a miniature and enamel painter. He moved to England in 1798 with his family, and eventually settled at Hanwell, London.

At sixteen years of age, she became governess in the family of Charles Paulet, 13th Marquess of Winchester. In 1821 she was engaged to lawyer and later Upper Canada jurist Robert Jameson. The engagement was broken off, and Anna Murphy accompanied a young pupil to Italy, writing in a fictitious character a narrative of what she saw and did. She gave this diary to a bookseller on condition of receiving a guitar if he secured any profits. Colburn ultimately published it as The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), which attracted much attention. Anna Murphy was governess to the children of Edward Littleton, later created Baron Hatherton, from 1821 to 1825, when she married Robert Simpson Jameson.

The marriage proved unhappy. In 1829, when Jameson was appointed puisne judge in the island of Dominica, the couple separated without regret, and Jameson visited Continental Europe again with her father. In that year she made her name when the "Loves of the Poets" was published. The book attracted a poem by Mrs. Cornwell Baron Wilson in tribute.

The first work which displayed her powers of original thought was her Characteristics of Women (1832). These analyses of William Shakespeare's heroines are remarkable for their delicacy of critical insight and fineness of literary touch. They are the result of a penetrating, essentially feminine mind, applied to the study of individuals of its own sex, detecting characteristics and defining differences not perceived by the ordinary critic and entirely overlooked by the general reader.

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