Author: Murphy, Anna
Biography:
MURPHY, Anna, later JAMESON (1794-1860: ODNB)
A Short Account of the Most Remarkable Trees and Plants; to which are added, Miscellaneous Poems, published by subscription in London in 1808, was commended by GM as “a precise, pretty account” of the subject. The periodical had already singled the author out, a year earlier, as a promising “young Authoress” on the strength of two poems accepted for publication in it. Subscribers included the Countess of Moira and Loudon, recently (1804) married in London; several members of the Bird family of Bristol; and “Miss Murphy” (also Anna, perhaps an aunt) who ran a seminary for young ladies in Doncaster. If our attribution is correct it would be an early, previously unrecognized publication by a very well known Victorian writer. Anna Brownell Murphy was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 19 May 1794, the eldest of five daughters. Her Irish father Denis Brownell Murphy (c. 1745-1842) was a painter of miniatures who had married an English wife, Johanna Gurden Bird (1775-1854), in Dublin in 1793. The growing family left Ireland in 1798 and passed through Whitehaven, Cumberland, and Newcastle before settling in London in 1806. During this period of relative prosperity, the children had a governess but from about 1806 Anna took over that role and in 1810—the year in which her father was appointed Painter in Enamel to the royal family--she began earning her living as a governess in various aristocratic households. Her First or Mother’s Dictionary appeared in 1813. With one family she travelled on the Continent—a journey that gave her a taste for travel and material for her first significant literary success, the fictionalized Lady’s Diary or Diary of an Ennuyée (1826). On 19 July 1825 she married Robert Sympson Jameson, a barrister, at St. George’s Hanover Square, London, and gave up governessing. The couple had no children and fairly soon accepted their incompatibility, but did not formally separate until 1838. Mrs. Jameson established a reputation as a prose writer of histories, travelogues, criticism (literature and art), and political analysis. She died of pneumonia at her rooms at 57 Conduit St., London, on 17 Mar. 1860, and was buried with her parents at Kensal Green Cemetery. (ODNB 26 July 2023; ancestry.com 29 July 2023; Darton; Orlando 26 July 2023; Brighton Gazette 28 July 1825; GM 78 [1808], 724, and 79 [1809], 251; Leeds Mercury 7 Nov. 1812)