Born in Dublin to an Irish miniature and enamel painter (who took his family to London when his daughter was only four), an established author known for her acute observations on Shakespeare's heroines (Characteristics of Women, 1832), and future mentor to the Langham Place feminists, Anna Jameson was summoned to Canada in the autumn of 1836 by her husband, Robert Jameson, who had been appointed Attorney General of Upper Canada. Jameson complied as a gesture towards reconciliation with her estranged husband. When it became clear that marital reconciliation was virtually impossible, she set out to ‘discover’ Upper Canada on her own, and set out on a tour which took her through many Native settlements. Jameson then saw much of Native life unknown to colonial travellers, before she sailed back to Britain in February 1838, having come to a separation agreement with her husband. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada was completed – not integrally written – and published shortly after her return. Jameson opens her travel journal with a Preface that posits that she has ‘abstained generally from politics and personalities’. One quickly learns, however, that her account is a highly-politicized memoir, wherein Jameson explores and criticizes the efficacy of British imperial practices and doctrines in British North America. Having travelled throughout Europe, encountering new cultures was not a new experience for Jameson, but the degree of cultural difference she encounters in Upper Canada quite obviously demands that she undergo a process of self-reflection, self-examination, and political change.

Although travel writing was a popular genre for nineteenth-century women who were looking to ‘expand [their] participation in the public sphere’, the degree of Jameson's self-conscious and mutable politicization distinguishes Rambles from other examples of the genre. What even more particularly distinguishes Jameson from many of her contemporaries is the ease with which this art historian – the aspect of her work for which she was then best known (see for instance The Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art, 1848) – uses her expertise with the visual realm to position herself within the colonial context.