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.

Clara Thomas (1919-2013) was a professor emerita of English at York University. Through her publishing, teaching and public speaking, she continuously sought to raise the profile of Canadian women writers both within the country and within the international community.

Clara Thomas' profile page

“Anna Jameson was a woman of character and a writer of distinction whose critical works won a wide, loyal, and even discriminating audience on two continents and helped to shape the taste of the age…Clara Thomas’s Love and Work Enough is a definitive study and a model of its kind….Professor Thomas restores Mrs. Jameson’s works to their central position in her life, and in so doing reanimates our interest in Anna Jameson as a person and redirects us to the books she wrote to please, to instruct, and to make money.”

Victorian Studies