The Diary of an Ennuyee

by Anna Brownell Jameson

First published in 1826, this is the first work by the noted Victorian author, Anna Brownell Jameson. At sixteen years of age, Anna became governess in the family of Charles Paulet, 13th Marquess of Winchester. In 1821 she was engaged to Robert Jameson. The engagement was broken off, and Anna Murphy accompanied a young pupil to Italy, writing in a fictitious character a narrative of what she saw and did. She gave this diary to a bookseller on condition of receiving a guitar if he secured any profits. Colburn ultimately published it as The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), which attracted much attention.

196 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1826

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.

Reviews

[Laura McNeal]

I think it's impossible to read this for pleasure, but it's an excellent way to examine what it meant to be a very, very well-educated woman in the early 19th century, and to see how much and how little traveling to Italy for self-edification has changed in the last 200 years. I wouldn't have thought one could go to mass in the Sistine Chapel 200 years ago and be irritated by hordes of insensitive shallow tourists clogging the aisles, nor that a young woman would be allowed to ride a horse up the sides of Mount Vesuvius while it was spewing lava and gigantic fiery rocks, nor that you could write a popular tragic memoir about your heartbreak without divulging the a single detail of your love affair. In memoirs, as in literature, apparently: nice people of the Victorian and Regency periods never wrote down what really happened in the bedroom or on the couch or in the grotto. Instead they languished, sighed, read poetry full of exclamation points, wrote down their impressions of paintings, praised the blue air of Italy, and soldiered on.

[Merve]

Bezgin Bir Kadının Günlüğü. Can Yayınlarından yeni yayımlandı. Her ne kadar yazarın İngilizvari, aristokratik bir onyargiya dayalı, yer yer ırkçılığa kaçan yorumlarını okumaktan hoslanmadiysam, özellikle gezip gördüğü yerlerdeki ressamlara ve tablolarına dair yaptığı yorumların çoğuna katılmasam da oldukça ilgi çekici bir kitap. On dokuzuncu yüzyılın ilk yirminci yıllarında yapılan Paris, Floransa, İtalya, Venedik ve birçok Avrupa ülkesini gezen yazarın tuttuğu günlükte ilginç anekdotlar var. Bahsettiği yerler, gittiği ülkeler, gezdiği harabeler ve müzeler buralarda gördükleriyle ilgili fikirleri izlediği tiyatro oyunları operalar baleler hakkında epey bilgi vermiş. Yazar aslında Zengin ve kültürel birikime sahip bir kadın, seyahati de o dönem için zengin bir yolculuk aslında hizmetçiler bavullar gittiği yerde onları karşılayan onlarla zaman geçiren soylular. İlginç detaylar yer alıyor günlükte.
Yazarın kendi seyahatlerinden derleyip toparlayarak yarattığı gezi anlatisina dayalı kurguda otobiyografik özelliklere ne kadar rastlamaktayız bilemeyeceğim çünkü bu yazarla ilgili okuduğum tek kitap. Ancak bir kalp kırıklığı neticesinde çıkılan seyahatlerde gittiği her yere kalbinin hüznünü, yitirilen sevgiliyi de taşıyan bir kadın anlatıcının tuttuğu günlükler, bir roman unsuru olduğu kadar, otobiyografik bir nitelikte tasiyordur diye düşünebiliriz belki de.