Travel writer, art historian, and feminist Anna Brownell Jameson pursued her varied and prolific writing career by necessity. Daughter of a miniature painter, by age 16 she was already helping to support her family as a governess. In one of her assignments she toured France and Italy with her employer, resulting in her first significant publication, A Lady’s Diary (1826), a fictionalized account of her travels that was republished by Henry Colburn as Diary of an Ennuyée later the same year. In 1825 she married Robert Jameson but separated from him a few years later. She published The Loves of the Poets anonymously in 1829, then republished it as Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets in 1831 and The Romance of Biography; or, Memoirs of Women Loved and Celebrated by Poets, from the Days of the Troubadours to the Present Age in 1837. Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns appeared in 1831 and was followed by Characteristics of Women (1832), a collection of essays on Shakespeare's heroines that was repeatedly enlarged. Other publications included The Beauties of the Court of King Charles the Second (1834); Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834); Sketches of Germany (1837); Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838); Sketches of Italy (1841); A Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art In and Near London (1842); Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in London (1844); Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature, and Social Morals (1846); A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies (1854); A Hand-Book to the Courts of Modern Sculpture (1854); Sisters of Charity (1855); The Communion of Labour (1856); Sketches of Art, Literature, and Character (1857); Memoirs of Early Italian Painters (1859); and Studies, Stories, and Memoirs (1859). Her best known work, Sacred and Legendary Art, comprised the four volumes Legends of the Saints (1848); Legends of the Monastic Orders (1850); Legends of the Madonna (1852); and The History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art (with Elizabeth Eastlake, 1864). Jameson also edited and/or introduced a number of other works and translated Social Life in Germany, Illustrated in the Acted Dramas of Her Royal Highness the Princess Amelia of Saxony, by Amelia, Princess of Saxony (1840).