Anna Brownwell Jameson (1794-1869) was a central figure in the London world of letters and art in the early Victorian period, and an important feminist writer. Her friends included such figures as Harriet Martineau, Lady Byron, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This study considers her life and works, using a different Jameson work as the central focus of each chapter. The author considers the particular non-fiction discourse in which the work is written, as well as such issues as gender and colonialism. Arranged chronologically, the book also charts the growth and development of a determined feminism in the vital years of the early Victorian period, and compares Jameson to her contemporaries.

Anna Brownwell Jameson (1794-1869) was a central figure in the London world of letters and art in the early Victorian period, and an important feminist writer. Her friends included such figures as Harriet Martineau, Lady Byron, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This study considers her life and works, using a different Jameson work as the central focus of each chapter. The author considers the particular non-fiction discourse in which the work is written, as well as such issues as gender and colonialism. Arranged chronologically, the book also charts the growth and development of a determined feminism in the vital years of the early Victorian period, and compares Jameson to her contemporaries.

Offering readings of nineteenth-century travel narratives, works by Tractarians, the early writings of Charles Kingsley, and the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, Devon Fisher examines representations of Roman Catholic saints in Victorian literature to assess both the relationship between conservative thought and liberalism and the emergence of secular culture during the period. The run-up to Victoria's coronation witnessed a series of controversial liberal reforms. While many early Victorians considered the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828), the granting of civil rights to Roman Catholics (1829), and the extension of the franchise (1832) significant advances, for others these three acts signaled a shift in English culture by which authority in matters spiritual and political was increasingly ceded to individuals. Victorians from a variety of religious perspectives appropriated the lives of Roman Catholic saints to create narratives of English identity that resisted the recent cultural shift towards private judgment. Paradoxically, conservative Victorians' handling of the saints and the saints' lives in their sheer variety represented an assertion of individual authority that ultimately led to a synthesis of liberalism and conservatism and was a key feature of an emergent secular state characterized not by disbelief but by a range of possible beliefs.

Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of Anna Jameson, Mary Cowden Clarke, Frances Anne Kemble and Charlotte Cushman to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.