Women’s Literary History Anna Brownell Jameson on Shakespeare’s Heroines in 1833

Anna Brownell Jameson

First Edition

Jameson, Anna Brownell, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical is a major work of nineteenth-century women’s literary criticism, using Shakespeare’s heroines as the basis for sustained analysis of female character, moral agency, psychology, and dramatic representation. First published in London in 1832, the work helped establish Jameson’s reputation as a critic and later circulated under the title Shakespeare’s Heroines, placing women’s interior lives at the center of Shakespearean interpretation in a period when women writers and performers were claiming broader authority in literary and theatrical culture. Jameson’s study supports research into women’s intellectual history, Shakespeare reception, gendered reading practices, and the emergence of women’s criticism in the Anglophone nineteenth century.

Jameson, Anna Brownell. Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical. Annapolis: Jeremiah Hughes, 1833. Two volumes in one. First American edition if so identified from the title page or bibliographic record. The work is dedicated to Fanny Kemble, the celebrated Shakespearean actress whose career made her an important contemporary point of reference for public interpretation of Shakespeare’s women. Bound in original green paper boards with leather spine; page count not supplied. The text examines Shakespeare’s female figures through moral, poetical, and historical categories rather than treating them as incidental dramatic types, making the volume significant as both literary criticism and a document of women’s cultural authority in the early nineteenth century.

The Annapolis printing gives the work additional interest as an early American edition of an Anglo-Irish woman critic’s influential Shakespearean study, showing the transatlantic circulation of women’s literary criticism soon after its first London publication. Extremities of spine rubbed and a little chipped; front hinge tender but secure; interior fine; overall good. A strong copy for collections focused on women’s literary history, Shakespeare reception, nineteenth-century criticism, and the intellectual history of women as interpreters of canonical literature.

Item #16033

Price: $485.00