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Anna Jameson and Sir Francis Bond Head December 20th, 2011

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on an article I’ve co-written with my research assistant, Blake Bouchard, entitled “The Grave Robber and the Paternalist: Anna Jameson and Sir Francis Bond Head among the First Nations of Canada.”  The article, which will be published in the journal Romanticism, may come as a bit of a shock to fans of Jameson’s writing, because it deals with a surprising and previously unknown allegation:  Bond Head accuses Jameson of having “very cooly” stolen a skull from an indigenous burial site during her summer rambles through the interior of Upper Canada in 1837.  Did she really do it?  Although it’s impossible to know for certain given the passage of time and the hearsay nature of Bond Head’s evidence, we weigh the pros and cons of the allegation carefully and decide that it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.  Look for the essay to be published sometime in the new year.  Perhaps it will change the way modern readers think of Anna Jameson, a brilliant writer who is often regarded as one of the earliest pioneering voices in Canadian literary history.