Anna Jameson is best known for her 1838 publication, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, the product of her brief visit to the country in 1836-7. Her contemporaries knew her as an influential literary critic, art historian, and advocate of an improvement in the status of women. Mrs. Jameson's life was as wide-ranging and varied in its attachments and interests as were her works. Through her husband, later attorney General and first Vice-Chancellor of Upper Canada, she met members of London's literary circle in the 1820s. Her friends included Ottilie von Goethe, the poet's daughter-in-law, the Brownings, Lady Byron, and Fanny Kemble.

Clara Thomas assembles the complex patterns of Anna Jameson's life and assess her work in a sensitive portrait of a memorable woman and her time.