Anna Brownell Jameson (May 17, 1794 - March 17, 1860), British
writer, was born in Dublin.
Her father, Denis Brownell Murphy (d. 1842), was a miniature and enamel painter. He moved to England in 1798 with his
family, and eventually settled at Hanwell, near London.
At sixteen years of age, Anna became governess in the family of Charles Paulet, 13th Marquess of Winchester. In 1821 she was engaged to 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 know as Baron Hatherton, from 1821
to 1825, when she married Robert Jameson.
The marriage proved unhappy. In 1829, when Jameson was appointed puisne judge in the
island of Dominica the couple separated without regret, and Mrs. Jameson visited
Continental Europe again with her father.
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 but 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.
German literature and art had aroused much interest in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Mrs. 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 Mrs Jameson's
enthusiasm first gave them an English reputation.
In 1836, Mrs Jameson was summoned to Canada by her husband, who
had been appointed chief justice of the province of Upper Canada. He failed to meet her at
New York, and she was left to make her way alone at the worst season of the year to
Toronto. After six months' experiment she felt it useless to prolong a life far from all ties of
family happiness and opportunities of usefulness. 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 Indian life unknown to travellers, which she afterwards embodied in her Winter Studies and Summer
Rambles. She returned to Great Britain in 1838.
At this period Mrs Jameson began making careful notes of the chief private art collections in and near London. The result
appeared in her Companion to the Private Galleries (1842), followed in the same year by the Handbook to the Public
Galleries. She edited the Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters in 1845. In the same year she visited her friend Ottilie
von Goethe. Her friendship with Annabella Byron, 11th Baroness
Wentworth dates from about this time and lasted for some seven years; it was brought to an end apparently through the
Baroness' unreasonable temper.
A volume of essays published in 1846 contains one of Mrs Jameson's best pieces of work, The
House of Titian. In 1847 she went to Italy with her niece and subsequent biographer (Memoirs, 1878), Geraldine Bate
(Mrs Macpherson), to collect materials for the work on which her reputation rests--her series of Sacred and Legendary Art.
The time was ripe for such contributions to the traveller's library. The Acta
Sanctorum and the Book of the Golden Legend had had their readers, but
no one had ever pointed out the connection between these tales and the works of Christian art. The way to these studies had been
pointed out in the preface to Kugler's Handbook of Italian Painting by Sir Charles
Eastlake, who had intended pursuing the subject himself.
Eventually he made over to Mrs Jameson the materials and references he had collected. She recognized the extent of the ground
before her as a mingled sphere of poetry, history, devotion and art. She infected her readers with her own enthusiastic
admiration; and, in spite of her slight technical and historical equipment, Mrs. Jameson produced a book which thoroughly
deserved its great success.
She also took a keen interest in questions affecting the education, occupations and maintenance of her own sex. Her early
essay on The Relative Social Position of Mothers and Governesses was the work of one who knew both sides; and in no
respect does she more clearly prove the falseness of the position she describes than in the certainty with which she predicts its
eventual reform. To her we owe the first popular enunciation of the principle of male and female cooperation in works of mercy
and education. In her later years she took up a succession of subjects all bearing on the same principles of active benevolence
and the best ways of carrying them into practice. Sisters of charity, hospitals, penitentiaries, prisons and workhouses all
claimed her interest--all more or less included under those definitions of "the communion of love and communion of labour" which
are inseparably connected with her memory. To the clear and temperate forms in which she brought the results of her convictions
before her friends in the shape of private lectures--published as Sisters of Charity (1855) and The Communion of
Labour (1856)--may be traced the source whence later reformers and philanthropists took counsel and courage.
She left the last of her Sacred and Legendary Art series in preparation. It was completed, under the title of The
History of Our Lord in Art, by Lady Eastlake.
External links
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia
Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public
domain.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
