Shakespeare's Heroines: Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical

by Anna Brownell Jameson

Long out-of-print, this beautiful reissue of Shakespeare's Heroines, complete with author Anna Jameson's provocative introduction and complemented with W. Paget's charming pen-and-ink wash illustrations, is as important today as it was groundbreaking when it was first published in 1832. The first in-depth exploration of Shakespeare's female characters (twenty-one of the bard's best-known plays), this is a must-have for Shakespeare collectors, students of feminist theory and gender roles, and scholars and anyone else with an interest in the Victorian era.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1832

About the author

Anna Brownell Jameson (May 17, 1794 - March 17, 1860) was an Anglo-Irish writer and feminist.

Her father, Denis Brownell Murphy was a miniature and enamel painter. He moved to England in 1798 with his family, and eventually settled at Hanwell, London.

Anna Jameson spent the winter and spring of 1836–37 in Toronto with her husband, Robert Sympson Jameson, attorney general of Upper Canada. She travelled extensively in southern Ontario during the summer of 1837, recording her impressions through her sketches, watercolours and writing in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838).

Jameson's first work, Characteristics of Women (1832) displayed her powers of original thought. Her analyses of William Shakespeare's heroines are remarkable for their delicacy of critical insight and fineness of literary touch. They are the result of a penetrating but essentially feminine mind, applied to the study of individuals of its own sex, detecting characteristics and defining differences not perceived by the ordinary critic and entirely overlooked by the general reader.