It has been one of the challenges of Fifty Irish Lives in Canada 1661-2017 to find women to profile. It reflects how history, written by men, had eliminated them from the record or simply anonymised them. One of the heroes of Fifty Irish Lives in Canada is Anna Brownell Jameson, née Murphy (born in Dublin in 1794, died in London 1860), profiled by Laura J. Smith. As we celebrate International Women’s Day, the lives of women we recovered, though few, must stand for the unrecorded lives and work of half the population throughout the history of the Irish in Canada.
Anna was a young child when her father Denis Murphy decamped to London to pursue his profession as a miniature portrait artist. By dint of talent and determination, she carved out a life of literary accomplishment, adventure, and fame that spanned England, Germany, France, Italy, and Canada. Ireland was never far from her thoughts. If there is a thread to Anna’s writing life, it is the role of women in society, beginning with her popular study of woman characters in Shakespeare’s play, Characteristics of Women (London, 1832). Her advocacy for women’s rights become more overt as the century unfolded and her own confidence grew.
By the time Anna wrote her famous three-volume travelogue of Canada, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles (London, 1838), she had become an advocate for women’s rights, driven by rage at how society enslaved them through lack of education and careers. In its degree of freedom and agency, she wrote, the position of Indigenous women was “more honest and honoured”[i] compared to that of European women. The lack of education for women made their situation as settlers far worse than their homebound counterparts. Anna writes: “I have not often in my life met with contented and cheerful-minded women, but I never met with so many repining and discontented woman as in Canada.”[ii] To the alarmed male critics of Anna’s feminist views, one woman riposted wittily “well they may be, for when the horse and ass begin to think and argue, adieu to riding and driving.”[iii]
Shooting rapids accompanied by Canadian voyageurs and Indigenous guides, Anna exulted in the pristine landscapes and exposure to Indigenous life. Notes the Dictionary of Canadian Biography: “… we see Anna at her best, an intrepid, adaptable, enthusiastic explorer, intensely interested in everyone she meets …. and everything she experiences. She was delighted to be “the first European female” to shoot the rapids at the Sault, her companion a part-Indian friend, George Johnston. Escorted homeward down Lake Huron in a bateau rowed by four voyageurs, she was awestruck by the unspoiled beauty of the islands around her.” [iv] Her adventures in the wilds of Ontario made her object of fascination to society women back in Toronto.
In her forthcoming profile, Laura writes, “Winter Studies and Summer Rambles has been reprinted countless times since its publication nearly 200 years ago and has been the subject of numerous scholarly analyses. It has been hailed as an important work of early feminism, travel writing, and of epistolary literature. For twenty-first century Canadians the book is a remarkable glimpse of a virtually unrecognizable Ontario covered in dark, forbidding forests, impassable unhealthy swamps, crisscrossed by blazed trails and ineffective corduroy roads.”
Anna’s arduous crossing to Canada had been occasioned by an attempt to rescue her relationship with her dullard husband, at the time Attorney General. He lacked concern for her emotionally or financially. They were contrary in character and her departure from Canada signaled the failure of the marriage.
A talented artist in her own right, Anna converted her landscape sketches into etchings to accompany her publications. In fact, her love of art and her work as an art historian was the mainstay of her intellectual curiosity and publications. Following years of arduous research, she published the Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in or near London (1842) and the Companion to Private Galleries of Art in London (1844). As Thomas writes, “After them she began to specialize in the field of art, where she was to become one of arbiters of public taste both in Victorian England and in America.” [v] Her writing on art was immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic because she was guiding a public eager to learn about an area of culture hitherto the preserve of the aristocracy.
As her place in society was established, Anna felt freer to embrace her Irish identity. She returned to Ireland in 1848, touring extensively against the backdrop of the Great Famine. She was horrified by the scenes of starvation, death and dissolution and disgusted at the anti-Irish bigotry of The Times. The pleasant part of the visit was staying with Maria Edgeworth and drinking whiskey punch with reverend fathers in a priory. Anna returned again in 1853 for an Irish exhibition. Her affinity for Ireland was illustrated by her warm response to any fellow countrymen she encountered or sought out on her travels. She felt most comfortable in the company of what she saw as her own people.
Anna’s five-volume work Sacred and Legendary Art was a major intellectual achievement and marked her out as a pioneering art historian. Regrettably, as Clara Thomas notes, Anna’s planned three-volume history of female artists who made their living by the “public exercise of their talents” never came to fruition.
As Anna labored to build her career as a writer and intellectual, she financially and emotionally sustained a household for her long-invalided father, along with her mother, two unmarried sisters, and a niece. Her advocacy for women’s right to education and the opportunities it allowed continued for the rest of her life. She was a mentor to a new generation of feminists.
Eamonn
[i] Clara Thomas, Love and Work Enough (Toronto, 1967), p.141.
[ii] Vol. 1, p. 108.
[iii] Mrs Proctor responding to Thackery’s criticism, cited Love and Work Enough, pp 141-2.
[iv] https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/murphy_anna_brownell_8E.html
[v] Op cit., p 164. The verdict in slightly amended form is repeated in the DIB entry https://www.dib.ie/biography/jameson-anna-brownell-a4254
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