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 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...
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
These attractive essays in belles lettres employ a relaxed, personal speaking voice (which does not, however, reveal its gender), which puts forward literary opinions with casual confidence. Many essays (like Samuel Johnson
's before them)...
Textual Features
Mary Hays
The title-page quotes Johnson
on the efficacy of education: Let it be remembered, that the efficacy of ignorance has been long tried, and has not produced the consequences expected. Let knowledge therefore take its turn...
Textual Features
Georgina Munro
A debauched earl is the narrator of this novel, which, typically for the genre, is peopled by characters from the gentry and the upper classes.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
744 (1842):110
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
The story is set during the reign of...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Griffith
To modern readers EG
's moral-hunting may seem beside the point, but like Elizabeth Montagu
(whom she cites admiringly as having given her courage for her own attempt) and theBowdlers
, she was interpreting...
Textual Features
Hester Lynch Piozzi
HLP
concentrates on the fine shades of difference between near synonyms, for instance Affability, Condescension, Courtesy, and Graciousness.
Winchester, Simon. “Roget and his Brilliant, Unrivalled, Malign, and Detestable Thesaurus”. Atlantic Monthly, Vol.
287
, No. 5, pp. 53-75.
57
She sometimes draws on Johnson
's Dictionary but does not always entirely agree with it. She...
Textual Features
Isabella Beeton
This first chapter goes well beyond outlining the provision of characters or proper wages for different classes of servants, venturing advice on the art of conversation and social etiquette. IB
quotes Samuel Johnson
on men's...
Textual Features
Frances Burney
Evelina opens with an ode to Charles Burney
(unnamed) as Author of my Being, which sounds like an apology for having written.
Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. Cambridge University Press.
Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible),
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
501
this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as...
Textual Features
Jane Warton
In this last publication JW
was concerned to disabuse the public of the idea that her younger brother had enjoyed drinking and smoking with low persons in alehouses (it was the allegation of low company...
Residence
Abraham Cowley
Biographer Samuel Johnson
was inclined to make fun of AC
's somewhat self-conscious retirement from London to the village of Chertsey in Surrey as escapist, whether it was the pressure of success or the disappointment...
Residence
Ruth Fainlight
The house, reached by a steep cart-track with hairpin bends, stood in an olive grove with a grapevine over the door. RF
went back to England the following autumn, and was still there when Sillitoe...