By Andrew Wittkop
October 13, 2026
A complicated friendship blooms during a fated meeting between two nineteenth-century women writers.
In the mid-1830s, the author Anna Brownell Jameson was called from Britain to Canada to help her husband secure a position in local government. Duty fulfilled, she secured a separation agreement but decided to make the most of the rest of her time in North America: she embarked on a trip around the Great Lakes to gather material for a book on the “plight of the Indian woman.”
In a remarkable interaction on Mackinac Island, where the current-day lower peninsula of Michigan meets the upper peninsula, she met Jane Johnston Schoolcraft—an Ojibwe American poet and translator, who was married to the geologist Henry Schoolcraft who was working as an Indian agent for the United States government. The two women talked extensively, bonding over their interests and plights, and sharing private demons.
After their meeting, Anna continued to gain recognition for her writing and became a larger part of the literary scene in Britain and the Continent, entangling herself in the affairs of the likes Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Ottilie von Goethe, Lady Byron, and Ada Lovelace. Jane became sicker and less able to work.
In Andrew Wittkop’s sensitive, subtle retelling, complete with Anna's sketches and other historical images, the nuances of the relationship between the two women reveal much about the complicated nature of connection and disconnection and Anna’s blindnesses and missed opportunities. While Jane’s work and life have been slowly gaining attention in the twenty-first century, this text opens a window on two under-remembered writers.
Praise for Literary Voyagers:
"Through its captivating account of Anna Brownell Jameson’s sojourn in North America and her bond with Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Literary Voyagers offers a vibrant, incisive portrait of a singular woman writer, while presenting an evocative study of friendship and the ongoing attempt to see the world anew." —Christine Lai, author of Landscapes
"Andrew Wittkop has written the book we have all been waiting for about the brilliant, complex and enigmatic nineteenth-century author and art historian Anna Jameson. Her life and work have been seamlessly blended in Literary Voyagers to create a fascinating portrait of a woman whose friends included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jane Carlyle, and Lady Byron and whose desires found her traveling through the wilds of Canada. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in how women in the nineteenth century were able to move through the world while creating us a body of work to enchant and intrigue us for generations." —Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender and Greyhound
"Literary Voyagers carefully illuminates a moment when the lives of two woman writers intersected. In vivid detail, Wittkop reconstructs the social worlds and literary careers that brought them together, as well as the prejudices that kept English traveler Anna Jameson, a celebrated author in her time, from granting full humanity to someone now recognized as an important Native American poet, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. The constructs of colonialism and race, the straitjacket of women's dependency, and the fluctuating landscapes of the Upper Midwest enfold Anna and Jane's unequal encounter. This book treats their intellectual contributions with the seriousness often denied to women whose style is now marked as sentimental; we see how they pursued their ideas amid the demands of respectability and the duties of care. Everything that Wittkop calls forth about their era raises questions for our own time: why do those at a disadvantage recapitulate their oppression onto others, and what does it mean for us, in turn, to extend understanding?" —Alicia Puglionesi, author of In Whose Ruins
"In Literary Voyagers, Andrew Wittkop fashions an engrossing story that shifts from the shores of Lake Huron’s Mackinac Island in the 1830s, with its Ojibwe canoes and wigwams, to the streets of London, Paris, and Rome. Letting us eavesdrop on the conversations they held nearly two centuries ago, he tells the stories of three fabled historic characters who, in very different ways, have inflected the world we live in today. These three strong, yet flawed, men and women left legacies in the areas of the geology of the Upper Midwest, the tales and languages of the Ojibwe and other tribes, the understanding of Italian Renaissance art, and the stirrings of women’s rights in Britain. Literary Voyagers is also a visual delight, filled with historic sketches, maps, and beautifully reproduced paintings." —Terry Pitts, Executive Director Emeritus of Cedar Rapids Museum of Art
9781540270290 | Paperback | 5 x 7
