Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Samuel Johnson
-
Standard Name: Johnson, Samuel
Used Form: Dr Johnson
Arriving in eighteenth-century London as one more young literary hopeful from the provinces, SJ
achieved such a name for himself as an arbiter of poetry, of morality (through his Rambler and other periodical essays and his prose fiction Rasselas), of the language (the Dictionary), and of the literary canon (his edition of Shakespeare
and the Lives of the English Poets) that literary history has often typecast him as hidebound and authoritarian. This idea has been facilitated by his ill-mannered conversational dominance in his late years and by the portrait of him drawn by the hero-worshipping Boswell
. In fact he was remarkable for his era in seeing literature as a career open to the talented without regard to gender. From his early-established friendships with Elizabeth Carter
and Charlotte Lennox
to his mentorship of Hester Thrale
, Frances Burney
, and (albeit less concentratedly) of Mary Wollstonecraft
and Henrietta Battier
, it was seldom that he crossed the path of a woman writer without friendly and relatively egalitarian encouragement.
The full title is Conversations on the Evidences of Christianity, in which the Leading Arguments of the Best Author are Arranged, Developed, and Connected with Each Other. For the Use of Young Persons and Theological...
Textual Production
Frances Reynolds
Johnson
found at this stage a good deal to criticize but also much to praise. The work possessed, he said, such force of comprehension, and such nicety of observation as Locke
or Pascal
might be...
Textual Production
Jan Morris
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM
followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...
Textual Production
Charlotte Lennox
She had written most of it by November 1751. With Johnson
as mediator, she consulted Richardson
about revisions, denouement, optimum length (she reduced her plan from three volumes to two), and about her choice of...
Textual Production
Hester Lynch Piozzi
Back in England, HLP
published her edition of Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press.
314
Textual Production
Anne Finch
One passage from a long Pindaric ode entitled All is Vanity (present in Finch's early octavo ms and in her printed collection) has broken loose and achieved a life of its own. Whereas the entire...
Textual Production
Sarah Trimmer
Her spur to beginning it was reading the published personal writings of Samuel Johnson
, which moved her deeply. She wrote it in the most secret hours retreat, and without the least intention ....
Textual Production
Eliza Haywood
It was advertised as intended for the younger and politer Sort of Ladies,
Haywood, Eliza. The Female Spectator. Xerox University Microfilms.
1: 5
though the reader is conventionally referred to as he. Advertising and other publicity was on a larger scale than...
Textual Production
Samuel Beckett
In late 1937 SB
was at work on a play about the relationship between Samuel Johnson
and Hester Thrale
,
Cohn, Ruby. Back to Beckett. Princeton University Press.
ix-x
which he intended to begin with her death (many years, therefore, after the relationship...
Textual Production
Susannah Dobson
Samuel Johnson
supposed, nearly a decade after its production, that The Life of Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, 1772, was by SD
: actually it was the last work of Sarah Scott
, who always published anonymously.
Johnson, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Editor Redford, Bruce, Princeton University Press.
4: 147
Textual Production
P. D. James
The title emerged from a remark of Samuel Johnson
about reaching the age of seventy-seven.
James, P. D. Time to Be in Earnest. Faber and Faber.
title-page
Textual Production
Mary Bosanquet Fletcher
Mary Bosanquet (later Fletcher)
wrote almost weekly to the ex-fashionable preacher Dr William Dodd
(in prison for forgery) until he was hanged, out of concern for his soul.
EC
's work, An Examination of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, translated Crousaz' Examen; A Commentary on Mr. Pope's Principles of Morality, or Essay on Man, by Johnson, 1739, translated Crousaz' second...
Textual Production
Beryl Bainbridge
BB
published another historical novel, According to Queeney, about Hester Thrale
and Samuel Johnson
, whose narrative sticks unusually close to its sources.
Eilenberg, Susan. “Leaf, Button, Dog”. London Review of Books, pp. 13-15.
13
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ
's next novels were Doubtful Joy, 1935, The Phoenix Nest, 1936, Robert and Helen, 1944, and Young Enthusiasts, 1947 (titled from Samuel Johnson
's description of the ambitious young scholar...