Literary Voyagers

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, 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. 

9781540270290 | Paperback | 5 x 7