Born in Dublin, Ireland

Anna Brownell Murphy was born on 19 May 1794 in Dublin, Ireland, the eldest of five daughters of Denis Brownell Murphy, a miniature painter of some repute, and his wife Anna. The family moved to England when Anna was a small child, settling eventually in London, where her father found patronage painting miniature portraits, including for members of the royal family.

Anna grew up in a household attuned to art and visual culture, an environment that would decisively shape her later career as one of the pioneering English-language writers on art history and criticism. Lacking formal institutional education available to boys of her era, she was largely self-taught and voracious in her reading, developing fluency in French, Italian, and German that later underpinned her travel writing and art-historical scholarship.

Her early exposure to the precarious finances of an artist's household, coupled with her family's social ambitions, pushed her toward employment as a governess in her teens — an experience that generated the material for her first successful book. The circumstances of her birth in Dublin and upbringing in England positioned her as an Anglo-Irish woman navigating both worlds, a duality reflected throughout her literary output.