Born [Anna Brownell Murphy], in Dublin, 17 May 1794. Family removed to England, 1798. Governess in Marquis of Winchester’s family, 1810–14. Travelled with a pupil in France and Italy, summer of 1821 to 1822. Governess in family of Mr. Littleton, 1822–25. Married to Robert Jameson, 1825. Obtained legal appointment in Canada for her husband, 1833. To Germany same year; friendship with Major Noel, Ottilie von Goethe, Tieck, Schlegel, etc. Joined her husband in Canada, 1836; returned without him, 1838. Friendship with Lady Byron. Active literary life. Visit to Germany, 1845. To Italy, with her niece (afterwards Mrs. Macpherson), 1847. Crown Pension, 1851. Quarrel with Lady Byron, about 1853. Died, at Ealing, 17 March 1860. Works: “A Lady’s Diary” (anon.), 1826 (another edn., anon., called “The Diary of an Ennuyée, same year); “The Loves of the Poets” (anon.), 1829; “Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns” (2 vols.), 1831; “Characteristics of Women” (2 vols.), 1832; Letterpress to “Beauties of the Court of King Charles II.” (illustrated by her father), 1833; Letterpress to “Fantasien,” 1834; “Visits and Sketches” (4 vols.), 1834; “The Romance of Biography,” 1837; “Sketches of Germany,” 1837; “Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada,” 1838; “Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in and near London,” 1842; “Companion to the most celebrated Private Galleries in London,” 1844; “Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters” (2 vols.), 1845; “Memoirs and Essays,” 1846; Letterpress to “The Decorations of the Garden Pavilion, etc.,” 1846; “Sacred and Legendary Art” (2 vols.), 1848; “Legends of the Monastic Orders,” 1850; “Legends of the Madonna,” 1852; “Handbook to the Court of Modern Sculpture in the Crystal Palace,” 1854; “A Commonplace Book,” 1854; “Sisters of Charity,” 1855; “The Communion of Labour,” 1856. Posthumous: “The History of Our Lord,” completed by Lady Eastlake (2 vols.), 1864. She translated: Princess Amelia of Saxony’s “Social Life in Germany,” 1840; G. F. Waagen’s “Peter Paul Rubens,” 1840. Life: by Mrs. Macpherson, 1878.

Personal

  I called on Mrs. Jameson, author of “King Charles’s Beauties.” She is very clever, middle-aged, red-haired, and agreeable, though I suspect you would call her a conceited minx.

  There are few people whom I pity more than Mrs. Jameson. I always thought she had a great deal of good in her, but the finer elements in her character have become more apparent and valuable to me the longer I have known her; her abilities are very considerable, and her information very various and extensive; she is a devoted, dutiful daughter, and a most affectionate and generous sister, working laboriously for her mother and the other members of her family…. I compassionate and admire her much.

  The poor lady seems to be very lame; and I am sure I was grateful to her for having taken the trouble to climb up the seventy steps of our staircase, and felt pain at seeing her go down again. It looks fearfully like the gout, the affection being apparently in one foot. The hands, by the way, are white, and must once have been, perhaps now are, beautiful, She must have been a perfectly pretty woman in her day,—a blue or gray eyed, fair-haired beauty. I think that her hair is not white, but only flaxen in the extreme.

  She had a pale, clear, intellectual blue eye, that could flash anger, or jealousy, or love; her hair was red, and her complexion very fair, and of the hue of an irate temper. Her arms, neck, and hands were beautiful, but her whole person wanted dignity; it was short, and of those dimensions that to ears polite are embonpoint—to the vulgar, fat. Her genius and accomplishments need no note of mine; they live in her books. I believe no woman has written more variously, and few, men or women, so well. She impressed me as the best talker I ever heard, and I have heard many gifted “unknown,” and many known and celebrated. Mrs. Kemble, who has had far more extended opportunities than mine, as she has been familiar with men trained to talk in the London social arena, I have heard assign the first place to Mrs. Jameson.

  Mr. Jameson was a man of considerable ability and legal accomplishment, filling with honor the posts of Speaker of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada, and the Attorney-General of the Colony, and he is spoken of with respect by his personal friends in England; but the marriage was a mistake on both sides. The husband and wife separated almost immediately, and for many years. In 1836, Mrs. Jameson joined her husband at Toronto; but it was for a very short time; and they never met again…. A warm-hearted and courageous woman, of indomitable sociability of nature, large liberalities, and deep prejudices.

  I well remembered her face,—“oh, call it fair, not pale!”—the whiteness of which was set off and intensified by her ruddy curls.

  One of the best and brightest women of the earlier years of the Victorian era…. She was a human Irish harp; to see her kindle into enthusiasm amidst the gorgeous natural beauty and the antique memorials and the sacred Christian relics of Italy was an experience not to be forgotten.

  There were various legends regarding Mrs. Jameson’s private history. It is said that her husband, marrying her against his will, parted from her at the church door, and thereafter left England for Canada, where he was residing at the time of her visit. I first met her at an evening party at the house of a friend…. She was of middle height, her hair red blond in color. Her face was not handsome, but sensitive and sympathetic in expression. The elegant dames of New York were somewhat scandalized at her want of taste in dress. I actually heard one of them say, “How like the devil she does look.”

General

  Shepherd. “Mrs. Jameson’s prose aye reminds me o’ Miss Landon’s poetry—and though baith hae their fawtes, I wou’d charactereese baith alike by the same epithet—rich. I hate a simple style, for that’s only anither word for puir.”

  I have been much interested, too, in Mrs. Jameson’s “Characteristics of Women,” a work full of beauty, grace and feeling. I have not dared to recommend it, for the moral lies too deep for most readers. Most readers would gather from it that woman has no higher vocation than to love; that absorption in this passion, at the expense and sacrifice of every other sentiment and every duty, is innocent; and that she whose hope is blasted in this has nothing to live for, perhaps nothing to do but to die, like Juliet, by her own hand. I do not mean that these lessons are taught, but that such impression would be received by not a few readers from several parts. Mrs. J. discovers in her introduction so just an appreciation of woman, that I wonder a loftier, healthier tone does not decidedly characterize her book. Perhaps I am hypercritical, for in some of her characters she pays just homage to virtue and to the high destiny of her sex; and I feel almost ungrateful in finding fault with a lady who has delighted me so much by her fine perception of character, her richness of illustration, and felicities of style.

  In the present century, Coleridge and Schlegel, so nearly at the same time that the question of priority and even plagiarism has been mooted, gave a more philosophical, and at the same time a more intrinsically exact, view of Shakspeare than their predecessors. What has since been written has often been highly acute and æsthetic, but occasionally with an excess of refinement which substitutes the critic for the work. Mrs. Jameson’s “Essays on the Female Characters of Shakspeare” are among the best. It was right that this province of illustration should be reserved for a woman’s hand.

  Tell that charming writer, Mrs. Jameson, that I (being a little prudish) took great offence at seeing so much beautiful praise lavished on the beauties of Charles the Second’s Court, whom I consider no better than they should be. But, afterwards, her strictures on Shakspeare’s female characters delighted me. She invested them with all the properties that I had long studied and admired, without a hope of meeting with any one that would understand, far less explain my feelings. Pray thank her for me for melting the frost of age about my heart, and restoring to me the delights of loving and admiring excellence. I can never do her any good, but she has done a great deal to me; thank her for me, I entreat you.

  Mrs. Jameson is an established favourite with the public. She is an accomplished woman, an elegant writer, and her refined taste and quick sensibility are good influences on her age. Her “Characteristics of Women” contain a searching analysis of character and fine criticism, such as ought to place her name among those of the greatest commentators of Shakspeare. Her exposition of the character of Cordelia is, in especial, beautifully true; and her perception of the intensity, and strength, and real dignity of soul in Helena (in “All’s Well that Ends Well”), notwithstanding that the tenor of all the incidents and circumstances around her wound and shock, manifests the true power to look beyond the outward show of things and read the heart. The “Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad” is a delightful book; accomplishing that rare task of rendering descriptions of works of art pleasant reading instead of dull catalogues.

  Nor could we give a better instance of real description and opinions interwoven with a romance—though in no way needing this fictitious interest—than another established favourite,—Mrs. Jameson’s “Diary of Ennuyée.”

  Mrs. Jameson’s volume on the “Female Characters” is a most eloquent and impassioned representation of Shakspeare’s women, and in many respects is an important contribution to critical literature. Its defects are so covered up in the brilliancy and buoyancy of its style, that they are likely to escape notice.

  It is especially in her descriptions of paintings [“Poetry and Legendary Art”] that Mrs. Jameson’s great talents are displayed. Nowhere do we recollect criticisms more genial, brilliant, picturesque than those which are scattered through these pages. Often they have deeper merits, and descend to those fundamental laws of beauty and of religion by which all Christian art must ultimately be tested. Mrs. Jameson has certainly a powerful inductive faculty; she comprehends at once the idea and central law of a work of art, and sketches it in a few vivid and masterly touches; and really, to use a hack quotation honestly for once, “in thoughts which breathe, and words which burn.”

  You have given me so much [pleasure] particularly in your last work, “Sacred and Legendary Art.” How very precious it is to me!… It most amply supplies the cravings of the religious sentiment,—the spiritual nature within. It produces in my soul the same effect that great organists have produced by laying slight weights upon certain keys of their instruments,—thus keeping an unbroken flow of sound while their fingers are busy with other keys and stops. And there let these volumes lie,—pressing just enough upon my thoughts to make perpetual music. God bless you for this book!

  A few writers of refined sympathies and highly cultivated tastes have laboured effectively at the development of an Art Literature in this country. Next to Mr. Ruskin, its originator and best-known representative, stands Mrs. Jameson. Early instructed in the principles of Art, she devoted to the unfolding of its beauties an arduous but fertile literary career of more than thirty years. No writer has done so much to acquaint us with the productions of the Early Italian Masters.

  At first sight, a very winning book [“Characteristics of Women”]. Wherever the reader opened, the picture was charming; and the analysis seemed to be acute, delicate, and almost philosophical. After a second portrait the impression was somewhat less enthusiastic; and when, at the end of four or five, it was found difficult to bring away any clear conception of any, and to tell one from another, it was evident that there was no philosophy in all this, but only fancy and feeling. The notorious mistake in regard to Lady Macbeth, to whom Mrs. Jameson attributes an intellect loftier than that of her husband, indicates the true level of a work which is yet full of charm, from its suggestiveness, and frequent truth of sentiment. Mrs. Jameson’s world-wide reputation dates from the publication of this book.

  On the subject of art, her writing is next to that of Ruskin; to intense love of the beautiful, she adds a fine discriminating and cultivated taste with rich stores of knowledge.

  Mrs. Jameson was absolutely without knowledge or instinct of painting; and had no sharpness of insight for anything else; but she was candid and industrious, with a pleasant disposition to make the best of all she saw, and to say, compliantly, that a picture was good, if anybody had ever said so before.

  Her “Sacred and Legendary Art” is a storehouse of delightful knowledge, as admirable for accurate research as for poetic and artistic feeling, and only marred to a slight extent by the authoress’s limited acquaintance with the technicalities of painting. She appears to equal advantage when depicting her favourite Shakespearean heroines, or the brilliant yet unostentatious society she enjoyed so greatly in Germany—to greater advantage still, perhaps, in the graceful æsthetics and deeply felt moralities of her “Commonplace Book,” or the eloquence of her “House of Titian,” an essay saturated with Venetian feeling. Much of her early writing is feebly rhetorical, but constant intercourse with fine art and fine minds brought her deliverance.

  A woman with much enthusiasm for art, and no inconsiderable power of literary expression, she had begun her literary career as a writer with other kinds of criticism, a work upon “The Female Characters of Shakespeare,” having gained her much reputation, and taught the public to expect from her that kind of commentary and appreciation of beautiful things which was then considered especially suitable to feminine authors, the elegant literature of the boudoir and drawing-room, not very profound or original, but full of good, nay, fine feelings and much prettiness, both of language and sentiment.

  In her “Winter Studies and Summer Rambles” she records her observations on Canada and the United States, as far as she traveled. The shadow over these original and spirited pictures is—unhappiness in wedded life! Everywhere she finds marriage a slavery, a sin, or a sorrow. The shaft in her own bosom she plants in that of every other married pair; like a person with a painful disease, she hears only of the afflicted, and fancies the world to be a hospital of incurables.

  Mrs. Anna Jameson was a better writer than Collier, and she enjoys an unclouded reputation. Her “Characteristics of Shakespeare’s Women” still holds its ground as a fine example of the critical analysis of character.