Love and Work Enough

Anna Jameson is best known for her 1838 publication, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, the product of her brief visit to the country in 1836-7. Her contemporaries knew her as an influential literary critic, art historian, and advocate of an improvement in the status of women. Mrs. Jameson’s life was as wide-ranging and varied in its attachments and interests as were her works. Through her husband, later attorney General and first Vice-Chancellor of Upper Canada, she met members of London’s literary circle in the 1820s. Her friends included Ottilie von Goethe, the poet’s daughter-in-law, the Brownings, Lady Byron, and Fanny Kemble.

Clara Thomas assembles the complex patterns of Anna Jameson’s life and assess her work in a sensitive portrait of a memorable woman and her time.