Anna Brownell Jameson field of work literary criticism
Anna Brownell Jameson (17 May 1794 – 17 March 1860) was an Anglo-Irish art historian whose work spanned art and literary criticism, philosophy, travel writing, and feminism. She became very well known for her extensive writings.  Jameson was connected to some of the most prominent names of the period including Joanna Baillie, Fanny Kemble, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and Robert Browning, Harriet Martineau, Ottilie von Goethe (the daughter-in-law of Goethe), Lady Byron, Harriet Hosmer, Ada Lovelace, Charles and Elizabeth Eastlake, and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon.Biography
Anna Murphy was born in Dublin, 17 May 1794. Her father, Denis Brownell Murphy (died 1842), was a miniaturist and enamel painter. He moved to England in 1798 with his wife Johanna and four daughters (of whom Anna was the eldest) 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 a "autobiographical" narrative under the guise of an unnamed and ailing young woman who eventually dies. 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, not least because the identity of the writer was soon discovered creating a scandal among reviewers in particular who felt they had been duped.  For Anna however, it was the first taste of notoriety.  Anna Murphy was governess to the children of Edward Littleton, later created Baron Hatherton, from 1821 to 1825, when she relented and married Jameson.The marriage proved unhappy. In 1829, when Jameson was appointed puisne judge in the island of Dominica, he left Anna in England (never sending for her during his time there despite repeated promises), and she 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: Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832).
She used her analyses of William Shakespeare's heroines to put forward a subtle account of female virtue. This book, which later became known as Shakespeare's Heroines, was incredibly successful. Harriet Martineau remarked that "Mrs Jameson's world-wide reputation dates from the publication of this book". The book was reissued 28 times during the nineteenth century alone. As Anne Russell says, "So widely was Shakspeare’s Heroines read that almost every subsequent nineteenth-century writer on Shakespeare’s women characters mentions the book".German literature and art had aroused much interest in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Jameson paid her first visit to the German Confederation in 1833. The conglomerations of hard lines, cold colours and pedantic subjects which decorated Munich under the patronage of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, were new to the world, and Jameson's enthusiasm first gave them an English reputation. In 1834 she published the book Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad about her German travels, which included many analyses of art and literature. This book was popular as well and meant that Jameson was important for importing German thought and culture into Victorian Britain.In 1836, Jameson was summoned to Canada by her husband, who had been appointed to the Court of Chancery of the province of Upper Canada. Jameson and her husband had already lived apart for over four years, during which Anna made a good living for herself as a writer. She made no secret of the fact that she was unhappy in her marriage. Upon her arrival, her husband failed to meet her at New York and she was left to make her way alone in winter to Toronto. Here she began the travelogue of her journey, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, which was published in Britain in 1838. She wrote in this book of her initial distaste for Toronto, describing it as "ugly" and "inefficient." After eight months of travelling and writing in Canada, she felt it useless to prolong a life far from all ties of family happiness and opportunities for a woman of her class and education. Before leaving, she undertook a journey to the depths of the Indian settlements in Canada; she explored Lake Huron, and saw much of emigrant and indigenous life unknown to colonial travellers. She returned to Great Britain in 1838.
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