Characteristics of women : moral, poetical, and historical

Characteristics of Women (1832) by Anna Jameson was the first attempt by a woman to analyse the characteristics of twenty-three heroines of Shakespeare's plays.

In this book, Jameson, an English writer, feminist, and art historian, addresses problems of women's education and participation in public life while providing insightful and original readings of Shakespeare's women.

Jameson classifies the heroines into four categories: characters of intellect, characters of passion and imagination, characters of the affections and historical characters, explored articulately across these two volumes.