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.
FB
's friendship with Woffington led to her meeting Peg's sister Polly
, who became her lifelong friend. Eight years older than Brooke, Polly Woffington was a close friend of Samuel Johnson
, Sir Joshua Reynolds
Friends, Associates
Frances Brooke
FB
knew Samuel Johnson
well by 1755, before the days of his greatest fame. According to family legend, she and her sister were the ladies whom he teased because they had noticed his omission of...
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...
Friends, Associates
Frances Burney
FB
made friends in the older generation as well as her own. The whole Burney family loved and were loved by David Garrick
. Sir Joshua Reynolds
, who lived barely fifty yards away from...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Frances Burney
Among the pleasures of FB
's life-writing are the way it revels in nonce-words and other innovative uses of language, and the play it makes with dramatic techniques like scene-setting and dialogue. Many famous passages...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Burney
In April 1780 the author's cousin Edward Francisco Burney
illustrated Evelina in three stained drawings. The one for volume two shows the heroine in her mood of depression after returning home from her visit...
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.
Evelina was an instantaneous success. While FB
's identity was still unknown she repeatedly listened to praise of herself, uttered in ignorance that she had any concern in it. Samuel Johnson
(like friends of Swift
Textual Features
Frances Burney
This novel adopts the point of view of an omniscient, often moralising, narrator. Its language has been often criticised as Johnson
ian. It has in fact little in common with Johnson's style, though it betrays...
Fictionalization
Frances Burney
Bibliographer James Raven
notes a crescendo in novelistic echoes of FB
's works during the 1780s. Burney's brother Charles
, for instance, noted borrowings from both Evelina and Cecilia in his review for the Monthly...
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
Medora Gordon Byron
This novel turns on a favourite Byron theme: the contrast between domestic and fashionable life. It opens, Above five hundred cards had announced to the fashionable world that lady Cheveril would be at home. It...
Education
Maria Callcott
Maria Dundas, aged seven (later MC
), began attending a school which occupied the Manor House at Draycot in Berkshire, run by the Miss Brights, who prided themselves on having been friends of Samuel Johnson
.
Gotch, Rosamund Brunel. Maria, Lady Callcott, The Creator of ’Little Arthur’. J. Murray.
19, 41
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Intertextuality and Influence
Rosa Nouchette Carey
One of the many novels which RNC
chose to dignify by quotations to head her chapters, this seems to make a particular attempt to impress. Those quoted imply considerable learning, even if (as seems likely)...
Occupation
Elizabeth Carter
Though unmarried, EC
was not without domestic responsibilities. Even after her father's second marriage she had household tasks. She made puddings and sewed shirts; and she tutored her half-brother Henry, twenty-one years her junior, to...