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.
In 1776 the future AML
recorded meeting the Corsican patriot Paoli
and Dr Johnson
ye Great.
Feminist Companion Archive.
After her marriage her own and her husband's work brought her into contact with the cultured elite of London...
Friends, Associates
Mary Masters
Among the households where she lived were those of Elizabeth Carter
(who sometimes read her work and discussed it with her) and of Edward Cave
(the proprietor of the Gentleman's Magazine). It was Carter...
Friends, Associates
Mary Scott
MS
was probably a friend from an early age of the dissenting hymn-writer Anne Steele
, who lived not very far away and who was a generation older. They spent much time together in 1773...
Friends, Associates
Oliver Goldsmith
Goldsmith met and became a friend and associate of Edmund Burke
, Samuel Johnson
, Sir Joshua Reynolds
, and others belonging to the Club, of which he was a founder member. He was a...
Friends, Associates
Mary Jones
Samuel Johnson
, visiting Oxford, boasted to MJ
of the closeness of his friendship with Charlotte Lennox
; a few months later Jones wrote to Lennox, to say she would be visiting London soon.
Isles, Duncan. “The Lennox Collection (Continued)”. Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol.
19
, No. 1, pp. 36-60.
42-3
Friends, Associates
Hannah More
Here she began to gather the circle of friends which by the end of her long life had touched every cranny of English society. She had already met Edmund Burke
in Bristol the previous September...
Friends, Associates
Catherine Talbot
Six months later CT
was staying with the duchess on an extended visit. She was also a good friend of Elizabeth Montagu
(of whose closeness to Carter she was sometimes jealous); of Montagu's friends George Lyttelton
Friends, Associates
Mary Palmer
MP
and her husband
entertained her brother Joshua
, sister Frances
, and Samuel Johnson
, sharing the hostess honours for several days with her married sister Elizabeth Johnson, who lived nearby.
Clifford, James L. Dictionary Johnson. McGraw-Hill.
282-5
Friends, Associates
Hester Mulso Chapone
Hester Mulso became a member of Samuel Richardson
's circle (as depicted in the well-known drawing by Susanna Highmore
), and engaged with him in lively debate on the position, status, and duties of unmarried...
Visitors to her parents' house included Oliver Goldsmith
and Samuel Johnson
, whom the Hawkins children nicknamed Polyphemus, after the one-eyed giant in the Odyssey.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts and Opinions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and C. and J. Rivington.
1: 86
After Johnson's death, John Hawkins was...
Friends, Associates
W. B. Yeats
Several women writers and public figures played very important roles in Yeats's life. Lady Gregory
(whom he first met in London in 1894 and whose close friend he became in 1896) played a crucial role...
Friends, Associates
Frances Brooke
Before departing for Québec to join her husband
, FB
attended a farewell party with Samuel Johnson
and other literary friends.
McMullen, Lorraine. An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke. University of British Columbia Press.
69
Friends, Associates
Charlotte Lennox
CL
won the enduring friendship of Samuel Johnson
and Samuel Richardson
. (With Johnson she quarrelled at least once, and he took pains to heal the breach.) She introduced Giuseppe Baretti
to Johnson, and had...
Friends, Associates
Mary Deverell
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes both that MD
received patronage from Bristol heiress Ann Lovell Gwatkin
, and that Hannah More
emphatically did not take to her, though their paths must repeatedly have...