ABSTRACT
As Virginia Woolf's list shows, the name of Anna Brownell Jameson was one of many that made up the London world of art and letters during Victoria's reign. Jameson belonged to a particular coterie which dominated the period 1830 to 1860. It was an intimate, self-reflective world to which Jameson made a considerable contribution with a range of innovative and exhaustively researched non-fiction works celebrated seriously in her own time, seriously enough for the erudite George Eliot to make copious notes from Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art. Jameson's work remained sufficiently celebrated only to become, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the butt of the kind of literary joke typified by the quotation from Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928).l Notably, Jameson's is the only woman's name to figure in Woolf's list, although many women were writing professionally throughout the Victorian period. Jameson is thus implicitly acknowledged as of sufficient reputation to warrant inclusion, even if the list comprises writers dismissed as mere hacks. Indeed, the quotation incidentally points to the whole Victorian debate over the professionalisation of literature, and Woolf's mistaken belief that women without money or leisure had been kept from any tangible occupation with the 'craft of letters' (Woolf, 'Women and Fiction', 51).
