The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 15. Mrs. Jameson
It was otherwise with Anna Brownell Jameson. She, too, was greatly senior to Ruskin, and had made a name as a miscellaneous author while he was still a boy. The facility of her style makes her volumes pleasant reading, and her analyses of Shakespeare’s heroines won, and have retained, as they deserve, considerable popularity. But the very title of one of her works, The Loves of the Poets, is suggestive of superficiality and popularity in the less favourable sense; and the fact that, in her Characteristics of Women, She, without qualification, ranks lady Macbeth as intellectually the superior of her husband, proves the suspicion to be well founded. She was in the field before Ruskin, but she was deeply influenced by him, and her various books on different groups of legends and legendary art bear his mark. Ruskin, however, in Praeterita, has pronounced a characteristically candid and gently satirical judgment upon her.