ABSTRACT
In histories of early feminism, Anna Jam eson (1794-1860) plays a small but significant part: she is the m entor figure for those mid-nineteenth-century activists who, in the words of M artha Vicinus, ‘laid the foundation for a generation who built institutions that then grew in directions well beyond their original conception’. Vicinus calls Anna Jam eson one of the ‘heroic pioneers’, a leader in the ideological battle for wom en’s rights.2 Ray Strachey, in her classic account of the nineteenth-century struggle for wom en’s em ancipation, The Cause, tells us she was ‘the idol of thousands of young ladies’.3 More recently, both Judith Johnston and Barbara Caine confirm her im portance as an inspirational figure.4 Like Caroline Norton, Anna Jam eson was personally representative of the inequalities and unhappinesses produced by the laws and customs relating to marriage in England in the first half of the n ineteenth century: she was the unhappy wife of an unsatisfactory husband.
