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 contents included odes, sonnets (including one sequence from Petrarch
and another based on Goethe
's Werther, in which she speaks as the male lover of a woman, with notes relating her poems to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Heyrick
Both the title-page and the body of the work quote (unascribed) lines about social injustice spoken by Shakespeare
's King Lear (who has only just realised the rampant injustice of the world and of his...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Masters
The poem here entitled The Vanity of Human Life must have been at least known to Johnson
long before he wrote his own Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749. Clemene's Character aroused the ire of...
Intertextuality and Influence
A. Woodfin
She learns to condemn her parents' treatment of her when she boards in a family who deliberately favour the ugly, deformed one of their young twins, to redress the balance. She feels a great relief...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Lee
The preface says that a woman, Precluded, by Sex, from the deep Observation of Life, which gives Strength to Character, feels inevitable Apprehensions . . . on making a first Effort in the Drama.
Lee, Harriet. The New Peerage. G. G. J. and J. Robinson.
prelims
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Nooth
The governess Matilda regrets that there are no professions for women; nothing is to be done but by the sacrifice of our rank in society.
Nooth, Charlotte. Eglantine; or, The Family of Fortescue. Valpy.
1: 199
She calls herself quite a detached being, alone...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Anna Aikin's allegory The Hill of Science seems both to derive from and to comment on Johnson
's Vision of Theodore, while her On Romances is a piece of literary criticism in a pastiche...
Intertextuality and Influence
Beatrix Potter
Of the first three stories, Carrier's Bob tells how a waggoner's terrier, Bob, is neglected and ill-treated by the widow after his master's death; The Mole Catcher's Burying describes how, as a village mole-catcher lies...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Jolley
EJ
invoked as an appropriate description of her own motivation, Flaubert
's dictum that writing comes from an inner wound.
Joussen, Ulla. “An Interview with Elizabeth Jolley”. Kunapipi, Vol.
15
, No. 2, pp. 37-43.
40
She said of Johnson
's Rasselas and Goethe
's Elective Affinities (both of which...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Lee
In this last volume HL
provides a general frame centred on the lodging-house of Mrs Dixon (a lodging-house whose history has been written, as Samuel Johnson
's Rambler 161 advises). She opens with a dialogue...
Intertextuality and Influence
Medora Gordon Byron
The title-page quotes Milton
's Paradise Lost (There wanted yet the master-work); the preface quotes Samuel Johnson
saying that the novelist needs to have first-hand experience of the living world, but that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Sarah Gooch
In this first publication ESG
stands on her dignity. She opens with a Johnson
ian aphorism (Some alleviation of our distresses is always derived from communication)
Gooch, Elizabeth Sarah. An Appeal to the Public. G. Kearsley.
prelims
and closes on a note of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sophia Lee
The plot in some ways echoes that of Richardson
's Pamela. Cecilia Rivers, orphan daughter of a poor and saintly clergyman, comes down in the world and has to earn her living as a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Loudon
In prose the opening tale, Julia de Clifford, presents a well-meaning but thoughtless and impulsive heroine who progresses from dressing up as a ghost to scare the servants, to plunging her lover into despair...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Whateley Darwall
Liberty borrows from Johnson
's newly-published Rasselas the idea of a happy confinement which is not happy. It laments the poet's lack of autonomy.
Messenger, Ann. Woman and Poet in the Eighteenth Century: The Life of Mary Whateley Darwall (1738-1825). AMS Press.