Letters from Anna Brownell Jameson

Anna Brownwell Jameson (1794-1860) was one of the foremost literary critics and art historians of the mid-nineteenth century. She was born in Dublin but her family moved to England when she was a young child. After working as a governess as a young woman, she married Robert Sympson Jameson, a barrister with literary connections, in 1825. When Robert was offered judicial appointments in Dominica and Upper Canada, Jameson did not accompany him. Their marriage was formally dissolved in 1838, leaving Jameson free to pursue her writing, although she struggled to support herself and her family for the rest of her life.

Although she wrote about women – including Shakespeare’s heroines – and for women readers, Jameson did not consider herself a feminist. She moved in the same circles as Hartley Coleridge, the Brownings, and Barbara Bodichon, many of whom were also friends with Elizabeth Jesser Reid. Her greatest achievement was the five-volume history Sacred and Legendary Art (1848-64) which remained in print from its publication until the 1920s.

Jameson’s letters to Reid demonstrate an intimate friendship between the two women, likely cemented by their shared commitment to educating women, albeit via different means: Jameson wrote that ‘the settlement of the woman's question involves more than “Colleges” can do.’ Reid invites Jameson to go travelling with her, and Jameson discusses her reading and family affairs with Reid. Discussion of the American novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Maria Sedgwick show how both women were embedded in a transatlantic literary culture. Jameson died in 1860, from bronchial pneumonia, which she contracted after working long hours in the British Library and walking home in a snowstorm.