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.
Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater
The present BL
Egerton MS 607 was at one time owned by the author's descendant Samuel Egerton Brydges
. Two contemporary copies of this manuscript, one of them with extensive and important annotation by the...
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Mary Ann Kelty
According to a reminiscence from the early half of 1868 by a reader who had been a Cambridge
undergraduate when the book appeared, MAK
first thought of titling her novel after its heroine, but was...
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Hannah More
Johnson
suggested some little alterations in Sir Eldred, though none in The Bleeding Rock.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press.
Her brother Joseph
(who had been invited to contribute by Samuel Johnson
in March) wrote to her on 26 April beg[ging] your Assistance in giving us some Pictures drawn from real Life. . ....
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Alice Meynell
In 1911 she edited a selection of writings by Samuel Johnson
.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production
Charlotte Lennox
CL
's friends Samuel Johnson
and Samuel Richardson
both saw her as a professional writer with a career to fashion: a career which needed her presence in London, heart of the publishing industry. Richardson...
Textual Features
Sarah Fielding
David Simple predates all fictional work by Samuel Johnson
and all but the earliest works by Henry Fielding
and Samuel Richardson
, which are sometimes mistakenly spoken of as its models. It may be seen...
Textual Features
Susanna Watts
SW
takes steps to prevent the cause of slavery entirely dominating her work, which, she announces, it will be devoted to the cause of suffering animals as well as to that of suffering men.
Watts, Susanna. The Humming Bird. I. Cockshaw.
34
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Mary Scott
MS
brings her list up to date with significant women writers who have published since the appearance of The Feminead. Her information is not perfect—she credits Anna Williams
with some works actually written by...
Textual Features
Frances Brooke
Mary Singleton, supposed author of this paper, with its trenchant comments on society and politics, is an unmarried woman on the verge of fifty,
McMullen, Lorraine. An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke. University of British Columbia Press.
14
good-humoured as well as sharply intelligent: a contribution to the...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Strutt
The book had coloured illustrations. ES
adopts here a relaxed, informal tone. She pays more attention than formerly to scenery (though she insists that only truly personal responses are interesting), but also to the humdrum...
Textual Features
Catharine Macaulay
In the copyright row provoked by unauthorised reprints by the Edinburgh publisher Alexander Donaldson
, CM
began by asking what practices would benefit literature, and concluded that publishers needed to be able to count on...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Burnet
This journal includes much philosophical writing. EB
's detailed critique of the mystic Antoinette de Bourignon
(correspondent of Anna Maria van Schurman
) embodies an ingenious rational explanation of enthusiasm or belief in a divine...
Textual Features
Sarah Fielding
This is a work of fiction, not documentary. It relates the stories of four ex-prostitutes sympathetically, presenting a strong argument for social reform. According to scholar Katherine Binhammer
, it is the most feminist among...